Jian Li
Yanyan Lu
J. Severino Pino Ibánhez
Shan Jiang- 1School of Emergency Management, School of the Environment and Safety Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, China
- 2Instituto de Investigacións Mariñas, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (IIM-CSIC), Vigo, Spain
- 3State Key Laboratory of Estuarine and Coastal Research, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
Editorial on the Research Topic
Carbon sinks in coastal wetlands: influences from multiple factors
Coastal wetlands, such as salt marshes, mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, and mud flats, are highly productive and valuable for sustainable development. Commonly referred to as “blue carbon” ecosystems because of their relevance in the global carbon (C) cycle, they provide climate mitigation benefits and a wide range of ecological services, such as erosion control, biodiversity support, water quality protection, and C sequestration (Lovelock and Duarte, 2019 and Macreadie et al., 2021). Despite covering a relatively small area, coastal wetlands are estimated to sequester nearly 54 Tg C yr−1, thereby serving as an efficient and natural “C sink” (Wang et al., 2021).
Coastal wetlands are also one of the most vulnerable and threatened ecosystems on Earth due to a series of anthropogenic and natural pressures (i.e., environmental pollution and biological invasions) (Yang, 2019). Such disturbances can dramatically impact their ecological integrity and C sequestration potential in the receiving systems. However, the ecological feedback and consequences remain significantly uncertain, which is a subject of growing interest and concern globally.
The editors of this special issue work on this research field in their academic careers for many years. With the support of a topic coordinator, three editors launched this Research Topic. We begin with modeling research by Li et al., which estimated the trade-offs between ecological degradation and the economic benefits of invasive plants and coastal reclamation in China. The authors concluded that coastal reclamation favors rapid economic gains over long-lasting ecological value while posing a potential long-term threat to the ecological integrity and C sinks of coastal wetlands. Another study by Carpenter et al. highlighted the importance of non-vegetated habitats in C accounting and management strategies. The study confirmed that the sequence of C-storing habitats was mangroves>saltmarshes>microbial mats>mudflats>seagrass>coastal sabkha, with the corresponding C contents of 94.3, 63.6, 51.6, 46.8, 32.5, and 31.0 t/ha, respectively, in the United Arab Emirates. In a similar study assessing C stock conducted in Southern Thailand, Phiranram et al.characterized the geophysical and chemical properties of peatlands in coastal wetlands, particularly C storage. Average values of bulk density (0.19 g/cm3) and total organic C (31.18 wt. %) from sediment core samples (7.5 cm diameter, 1 m length) were used to determine the C density of the peat layers, with a result of 64.09 Kg C/m3 in the study area. Overall, these research contributions further recognized the enormous potential of coastal wetland ecosystems to store and sequester carbon.
Despite the accepted publications in this special topic highlighting the impacts of coastal reclamation, plant invasion, and environmental pollution, on carbon sink capacity in different types of coastal wetlands (peatlands, mangroves, salt marshes, mud flats, seagrass), knowledge gaps in understanding the critical roles in maintaining the blue C function still exist, such as the mechanisms of C sequestration (Liao et al., 2024a), the origin of buried C (Holmquist et al., 2024), the production and emission of greenhouse gases (Liao et al., 2024b), the linkages between C biogeochemistry and other elements, and the vulnerability to climate change and non-climatic disturbances (Wei et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2023), and look forward to future research exploring these topics. Finally, as guest editors, we appreciate all the authors and reviewers for their great contributions. We hope that this Research Topic can incentivize researchers to persistently protect coastal blue C ecosystems, and provide scientific solutions for coastal wetland conservation and C neutrality policies.
Author contributions
JL: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. SJ: Writing – review & editing. YL: Writing – review & editing. JI: Writing – review & editing.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher’s note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
References
Holmquist J. R., Klinges D., Lonneman M., Wolfe J., Boyd B., Eagle M., et al. (2024). The coastal carbon library and atlas: Open source soil data and tools supporting blue carbon research and policy. Glob. Change Biol. 30, e17098. doi: 10.1111/gcb.17098
Liao X. L., Wang Y., Malghani S., Zhu X. D., Cai W. Q., Qin Z. C., et al. (2024a). Methane and nitrous oxide emissions and related microbial communities from mangrove stems on Qi’ao Island, Pearl River Estuary in China. Sci. Total Environ. 915, 170062. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.170062
Liao Q. H., Yuan F., Fan Q. Y., Chen H. Y., Wang Y. M., Zhang C. C., et al. (2024b). Plant- and microbial-mediated soil organic carbon accumulation in Spartina alterniflora salt marshes. Catena. 237, 107777. doi: 10.1016/j.catena.2023.107777
Lovelock C. E., Duarte C. M. (2019). Dimensions of blue carbon and emerging perspectives. Biol. Lett. 15, 20180781. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2018.0781
Macreadie P. I., Costa M. D. P., Atwood T. B., Friess D. A., Kelleway J. J., Kennedy H., et al. (2021). Blue carbon as a natural climate solution. Nat. Rev. Earth Environ. 2, 826–839. doi: 10.1038/s43017-021-00224-1
Wang F., Sanders C. J., Santos I. R., Tang J., Schuerch M., Kirwan M. L., et al. (2021). Global blue carbon accumulation in tidal wetlands increases with climate change. Natl. Sci. Rev. 8, nwaa296. doi: 10.1093/nsr/nwaa296
Wei S. Y., Han G. X., Chu X. J., Sun B. Y., Song W. M., He W. J., et al. (2021). Prolonged impacts of extreme precipitation events weakened annual ecosystem CO2 sink strength in a coastal wetland. Agric. For. Meteorol. 310, 108655. doi: 10.1016/j.agrformet.2021.108655
Yang R. M. (2019). Interacting effects of plant invasion, climate, and soils on soil organic carbon storage in coastal wetlands. J. Geophys. Res. Biogeosci. 124, 2554–2564. doi: 10.1029/2019JG005190
Keywords: coastal wetlands, blue carbon sink, naturally or anthropogenically induced disturbances, ecological integrity, sustainable development
Citation: Li J, Lu Y, Ibánhez JSP and Jiang S (2024) Editorial: Carbon sinks in coastal wetlands: influences from multiple factors. Front. Mar. Sci. 11:1380960. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2024.1380960
Received: 02 February 2024; Accepted: 29 March 2024;
Published: 09 April 2024.
Edited and Reviewed by:
Laura Airoldi, University of Padova, ItalyCopyright © 2024 Li, Lu, Ibánhez and Jiang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Jian Li, jianli@ujs.edu.cn