Abstract
Abstract. Carbon stored in coastal wetland ecosystems is of global relevance to climate regulation. Broadscale inventories of this “blue” carbon store are currently lacking and labour intensive. Sampling 23 salt marshes in the United Kingdom, we developed a Saltmarsh Carbon Stock Predictor (SCSP) with the capacity to predict up to 44 % of spatial variation in surface soil organic carbon (SOC) stock (0–10 cm) from simple observations of plant community and soil type. Classification of soils into two types (sandy or not-sandy) explained 32 % of variation in SOC stock. Plant community type (five vegetation classes) explained 37 % of variation. Combined information on soil and plant community types explained 44 % of variation in SOC stock. GIS maps of surface SOC stock were produced for all salt marshes in Wales (∼4000 ha), using existing soil maps and governmental vegetation data and demonstrating the application of the SCSP for large-scale predictions of blue carbon stores and the use of plant community traits for predicting ecosystem services.
Highlights
Implementation of environmental policy and management via “the ecosystem approach” requires a broadscale knowledge of the distribution of natural stocks and ecosystem services (McKenzie et al, 2014; Meiner et al, 2013; TEEB, 2010; UK National Ecosystem Assessment, 2014)
This study has demonstrated that a large proportion of the variation in surface layers of soil organic carbon (SOC) stock in salt-marsh habitats can be predicted from just two easy-to-measure variables, plant community and simplified soil type, which together accounted for close to half of the variation in SOC stock in 23 Welsh salt marshes
Associations of SOC with plant and soil characteristics have been demonstrated in other ecosystems (Amundson, 2001; Bai et al, 2016; Manning et al, 2015), this study is the first to use such relationships to produce a national inventory of blue carbon storage in surface soil layers
Summary
Implementation of environmental policy and management via “the ecosystem approach” requires a broadscale knowledge of the distribution of natural stocks and ecosystem services (McKenzie et al, 2014; Meiner et al, 2013; TEEB, 2010; UK National Ecosystem Assessment, 2014). There are few predictive tools for coastal systems, which, combined with a shortage of baseline data for many environmental variables (Robins et al, 2016), means that distributional maps of ecosystem services and stocks are lacking for global coastlines (Meiner et al, 2013). A global inventory of blue carbon remains a challenge, as empirical observations of SOC stocks in coastal wetlands are expensive, scarce, and unevenly distributed, with few records even for relatively well-studied areas such as Europe (Beaumont et al, 2014). Ecosystem service maps for the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (NEA) for Wales, the focal region of the present study, characterised salt marshes as coastal margin habitat, assigned the lowest category of carbon storage relative to all Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union
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