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A Methane-Charged Carbon Pump in Shallow Marine Sediments

Posted by mmaheigan

· Wednesday, June 3rd, 2020

Ocean margins are often characterized by the transport of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, entering from the subsurface and moving towards the seafloor. However, a significant portion of subsurface methane is consumed within shallow sediments via microbial driven anaerobic oxidation of methane (AOM). AOM converts the methane carbon to dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) and reduces the amount of sulfate that diffuses down from the seafloor towards a sediment interval known as the sulfate-methane transition zone (SMTZ). The SMTZ is where the upward flux of methane encounters the downward diffusive sulfate flux (Figure 1). While the mechanisms of methane production and consumption have been extensively studied, the fate of the DIC that is produced in methane-charged sediments is not well constrained.

In a recent study published in Frontiers in Marine Science, authors used existing reports of methane and sulfate flux values to the SMTZ and synthesized a carbon flow model to quantify the DIC cycling in diffusive methane flux sites globally. They report an annual average of 8.7 Tmol (1 Tmol = 10¹² moles) of DIC entering the diffusive methane-charged shallow marine sediments due to sulfate reduction coupled with AOM and organic matter degradation, as well as DIC input from depth (Figure 1). Approximately 75% (average of 6.5 Tmol year^–1) of this DIC pool flows upward toward the water column, making it a potential contributor to oceanic CO₂and ocean acidification. Further, an average of 1.7 Tmol year^–1DIC precipitates as methane-derived authigenic carbonates. This synthesis emphasizes the importance of the SMTZ, not only as a methane sink but also an important biogeochemical front for global DIC cycling.

Figure 1: A simplified representation of DIC cycling at diffusive methane charged settings.

The study highlights that regions characterized by diffusive methane fluxes can contribute significantly to the oceanic inorganic carbon pool and sedimentary carbonate accumulation. DIC outflux from the methane-charged sediments is comparable to ~20% global riverine DIC flux to oceans. Methane-derived authigenic carbonate precipitation is comparable to ~15% of carbonate accumulation on continental shelves and in pelagic sediments, respectively. These pathways must be included in coastal and geologic carbon models.

Authors:
Sajjad Akam (Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi)
Richard Coffin (Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi)
Hussain Abdulla (Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi)
Timothy Lyons (University of California, Riverside)

Global change impacts soil carbon storage in blue carbon ecosystems

Posted by mmaheigan

· Wednesday, May 20th, 2020

Vegetated coastal “blue carbon” ecosystems, including sea grasses, mangroves, and salt marshes, provide valuable ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, storm protection, critical habitat, etc.. Many of these services are supported by the ability of blue carbon ecosystems to accumulate soil organic carbon over thousands of years. Rapidly changing climate and environmental conditions will impact decomposition and thus the global reservoir of organic carbon in coastal soils. A recent Perspective article published in Nature Geoscience focused on the biogeochemical factors affecting decomposition in coastal soils, such as mineral protection, redox zonation, water content and movement, and plant-microbe interactions. The authors explored the spatial and temporal scales of these decomposition mechanisms and developed a conceptual framework to characterize how they may respond to environmental disturbances such as land-use change, nutrient loading, warming, and sea-level rise.

Figure caption: Temperate salt marshes (MA, USA). Healthy salt marshes have lush stands of grasses (top). Storms can expose peat deposits that have been buried for thousands of years (bottom). The fate of this soil carbon is unknown, but some fraction will be respired by microbes and returned to the atmosphere as CO₂.

Improved estimates of soil organic carbon in blue carbon systems will require better characterization of these processes from sustained data sets. Furthermore, incorporation of these decomposition mechanisms into ecosystem evolution models will improve our capacity to quantify and predict changes in these soil carbon reservoirs, which could facilitate their inclusion in global budgets and management tools.

Temperate salt marshes (MA, USA). Healthy salt marshes have lush stands of grasses (left/top). Storms can expose peat deposits that have been buried for thousands of years (right/bottom). The fate of this soil carbon is unknown, but some fraction will be respired by microbes and returned to the atmosphere as CO₂.

Authors:
Amanda C Spivak (University of Georgia)
Jon Sanderman (Woods Hole Research Center)
Jennifer Bowen (Northeastern University)
Elizabeth A. Canuel (Virginia Institute of Marine Science)
Charles S Hopkinson (University of Georgia)

An Important Biogeochemical Link between Organic and Inorganic Carbon Cycling: Contributions of Organic Alkalinity

Posted by mmaheigan

· Wednesday, April 8th, 2020

As a part of dissolved organic carbon (DOC), organic acid charge groups can contribute significantly to total alkalinity (TA) in natural waters. Such a contribution is termed as organic alkalinity (OrgAlk). Beyond being part of TA, OrgAlk represents an important biogeochemical linkage between organic and inorganic carbon cycling. In other words, the biogeochemical cycling of organic acid charge groups – i.e. their sources, sinks, and biogeochemical behaviors – directly impacts pH and carbonate speciation, which may ultimately influence air-water CO₂ exchange and inorganic carbon fluxes. However, the effects of OrgAlk is often ignored or treated as a calculation uncertainty in many aquatic CO₂ studies. How we treat and study OrgAlk may need a new paradigm under biogeochemical cycles.

Based on direct titration data of OrgAlk, the authors of a recent study conducted a comprehensive assessment of OrgAlk variability, sources, and characteristics in a sub-estuary of Waquoit Bay (Massachusetts). The sub-estuary is influenced by a salt marsh, groundwater input, and offshore water. Both the salt marsh and groundwater OrgAlk contributed up to 4.3% of the TA across all sampled seasons. Estuarine OrgAlk:DOC ratios varied across space and time, which suggests that their abundances are controlled by different biogeochemical processes. In addition, the study demonstrates the insufficiency of using a fixed proportion of DOC to account for OrgAlk, as well as the challenge of using measured pH, TA, and dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) to estimate OrgAlk. The effects of OrgAlk in these waters are equivalent to a pH change of ~ 0.03 – 0.26, or a pCO₂ change of ~30–1600 matm. If extrapolating OrgAlk results to other coastal systems ranging from estuaries to continental shelves, OrgAlk would exert a strong control on both carbonate speciation and, ultimately, air-sea CO₂ fluxes. This study provides a new conceptual framework for cycling of OrgAlk species and associated links between DOC and DIC pools in coastal systems (Figure 1).

Figure caption: A conceptual model of organic alkalinity cycling in coastal systems. BioP and ChemP represent in-situ biological production and chemical production of organic acid charge groups, respectively. Alk denotes total alkalinity. Arrows with dashed lines indicate processes that were not studied in the present study. The values in the boxes of pH, pCO₂, and buffer capacity represent the magnitude of OrgAlk effects on pH, pCO₂, and buffer capacity in the range of OrgAlk% in TA observed in this study (0.9 – 4.3%).

Authors
Shuzhen Song (East China Normal University)
Zhaohui Aleck Wang (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)
Meagan Eagle Gonneea (U. S. Geological Survey)
Kevin D. Kroeger (U. S. Geological Survey)

Chasing Sargassum in the Atlantic Ocean

Posted by mmaheigan

· Wednesday, March 25th, 2020

The pelagic brown alga Sargassum forms a habitat that hosts a rich diversity of life, including other algae, crustaceans, fish, turtles, and birds in both the Gulf of Mexico and the area of the Atlantic Ocean known as the Sargasso Sea. However, high abundances of Sargassum have been appearing in the tropical Atlantic, in some cases 3,000 miles away from the Sargasso Sea. This is a new phenomenon. Nearly every year since 2011, thick mats of Sargassum have blanketed the coastlines of many countries in tropical Africa and the Americas. When masses of Sargassum wash ashore, the seaweed rots, attracts insects, and repels beachgoers, with adverse ecological and socioeconomic effects. A new study in Progress in Oceanography sheds light on the mystery.

Figure 1. The hypothesized route of Sargasso Sea Sargassum to the tropical Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea. The solid black lines indicate the climatological surface flow, the dashed black lines indicate areas where there was variability from the average conditions.

The authors analyzed reams of satellite data and used computer models of the Earth’s winds and ocean currents to try to understand why these large mats started to arrive in coastal areas in 2011. A strengthening and southward shift of the westerlies in the winter of 2009-2010 caused ocean currents to move the Sargassum toward the Iberian Peninsula, then southward in the Canary Current along Africa, where it entered the tropics by the middle of 2010 (Figure 1). The tropical Atlantic provided ample sunlight, warmer sea temperatures, and nutrients for the algae to flourish. In 2011, Sargassum spread across the entire tropical Atlantic in a massive belt north of the Equator, along the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), and these blooms have appeared nearly every year since. Utilizing international oceanographic studies done in the Atlantic since the 1960s, and multiple satellite sensors combined with Sargassum distribution patterns, the authors discovered that the trade winds aggregate the Sargassum under the ITCZ and mix the water deep enough to bring new nutrients to the surface and sustain the bloom.

Improved understanding and predictive capacity of Sargassum bloom occurrence will help us better constrain and quantify its impacts on our ecosystems, which can inform management of valuable fisheries and protected species.

Authors:
Elizabeth Johns (NOAA AMOL)
Rick Lumpkin (NOAA AMOL)
Nathan Putman (LGL Ecological Research Associates)
Ryan Smith (NOAA AMOL)
Frank Muller-Karger (University of South Florida)
Digna Rueda-Roa (University of South Florida)
Chuanmin Hu (University of South Florida)
Mengqiu Wang (University of South Florida)
Maureen Brooks (University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science)
Lewis Gramer (NOAA AMOL and University of Miami)
Francisco Werner (NOAA Fisheries)

A new tidal non-photochemical quenching model reveals obscured variability in coastal chlorophyll fluorescence

Posted by mmaheigan

· Tuesday, October 15th, 2019

Although chlorophyll fluorescence is widely-used as a proxy for chlorophyll concentration, sunlight exposure makes fluorescence measurements inaccurate through a process called non-photochemical quenching, limiting its proxy accuracy during daylight hours. In the open ocean, where time and space scales are large relative to variability in phytoplankton concentration, daytime chlorophyll fluorescence—necessary for satellite algorithm validation and for understanding diurnal variability in phytoplankton abundance—can be estimated by averaging across successive nighttime, unquenched values. In coastal waters, where semidiurnal tidal advection drives small scale patchiness and short temporal variability, successive nighttime observations do not accurately represent the intervening daytime. Thus, it is necessary to apply a non-photochemical quenching correction that accounts for the additional effect of tidal advection.

In a recent study in L&O Methods, authors developed a model that uses measurements of tidal velocity to correct daytime chlorophyll fluorescence for non-photochemical quenching and tidal advection. The model identifies high tide and low tide endmember populations of phytoplankton from tidal velocity, and estimates daytime chlorophyll fluorescence as a conservative interpolation between endmember fluorescence at those tidal maxima and minima (Figure 1). Rather than removing nearly 12 hours’ worth of hourly chlorophyll fluorescence observations (i.e., all of the daytime observations) as was previously necessary, this model recovers them. The model output performs more accurately as a proxy for chlorophyll concentration than raw daytime chlorophyll fluorescence measurements by a factor of two, and enables tracking of phytoplankton populations with chlorophyll fluorescence in a Lagrangian sense from Eulerian measurements. Finally, because the model assumes conservation, periods of non-conservative variability are revealed by comparison between model and measurements, helping to elucidate controls on variability in phytoplankton abundance in coastal waters.

Figure 1: Model (light blue line) is a tidal interpolation between high tide (blue points) and low tide (red points) phytoplankton endmembers. The model represents nighttime, unquenched chlorophyll fluorescence measurements well (black points), while daytime, quenched measurements are visibly reduced (gray points).

This result is a critical achievement, as it enables the use of daytime chlorophyll fluorescence, which increases the temporal resolution of coastal chlorophyll fluorescence measurements, and also provides a mechanism for satellite validation of the ocean color chlorophyll data product in coastal waters. The model’s capacity to accurately simulate the pervasive effect of non-photochemical quenching makes it a vital tool for any researcher or coastal water manager measuring chlorophyll fluorescence. This model will help to provide new insights on the movement of and controls on phytoplankton populations across the land-ocean continuum.

Authors:
Luke Carberry (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Collin Roesler (Bowdoin College)
Susan Drapeau (Bowdoin College)

Nutrient and carbon limitation drive broad-scale patterns of mixotrophy in the ocean

Posted by mmaheigan

· Tuesday, May 14th, 2019

In the ocean, unicellular eukaryotes are often mixotrophic, which means they photosynthesize and also consume prey. In recent decades, it has become clear that mixotrophs are ubiquitous in sunlit ocean habitats. Additionally, models predict that mixotrophs have important impacts on productivity, nutrient cycling, carbon export, and food web structure. However, there is little understanding of the environmental conditions that select for a mixotrophic lifestyle, and it is unclear how mixotrophs succeed in competition with autotrophic and heterotrophic specialists. A recent study in PNAS that synthesized measurements of mixotrophic nanoflagellates showed that mixotrophs are more abundant in stratified, well-lit, low latitude environments (Figure 1A). They are also more abundant, relative to pure heterotrophs, in productive coastal environments (Figure 1B). A trait-based model analysis revealed that the success of mixotrophs depends on the fact that they are less nutrient-limited than autotrophs (due to prey-derived nutrients) and less carbon-limited than heterotrophs (due to photosynthesis). This synergy requires sufficient light, leading to success in low latitude environments. Similarly, a greater supply of dissolved nutrients relative to prey, as commonly observed in coastal environments, favors mixotrophs relative to heterotrophs. One implication of these results is that carbon fixation at lower latitudes may be enhanced by mixotrophy, while limiting nutrients may be more efficiently transferred to higher trophic levels.

Figure 1. Estimated abundance of autotrophic, mixotrophic, and heterotrophic nanoflagellates across environmental gradients in the ocean.

Author:
Kyle Edwards (Univ. Hawaii at Manoa)

Impacts of atmospheric nitrogen deposition and coastal nitrogen fluxes on oxygen concentrations in Chesapeake Bay

Posted by mmaheigan

· Tuesday, April 30th, 2019

How do atmospheric and oceanic nutrients impact oxygen concentrations in the Chesapeake Bay? Generally, researchers focus on how terrestrial nutrients impact hypoxia. The relative importance of river, atmosphere, and ocean inputs have not been quantified, largely because estimates of nitrogen fluxes from the atmosphere and ocean are limited.

A recent study in Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans quantified the relative impacts of atmospheric and oceanic nitrogen inputs on dissolved oxygen (DO) in the Chesapeake Bay. The authors combined a 3-D biogeochemical model and estimates of atmospheric deposition from the Community Multiscale Air Quality model and interpolations of nitrogen concentrations along the continental shelf from the Ocean Acidification Data Stewardship Project. Atmospheric nitrogen deposition and coastal nitrogen fluxes most impact Chesapeake Bay DO concentrations during the summer when surface waters are depleted in nitrogen. Overall, atmospheric nitrogen deposition has about the same gram-for-gram impact on Chesapeake Bay DO as riverine loading. Although all three nutrient sources vary spatially and temporally, in the central bay, where summer hypoxia is most prevalent, coastal nitrogen fluxes and atmospheric nitrogen fluxes have roughly the same impact on bottom oxygen as a ~10% change in riverine nitrogen loading (Figure 1).

Figure caption: (Left) Four-year (2002–2005) average increase in DO in the summer by removing the atmospheric nitrogen deposition (AtmN), reducing the riverine loading (ΔRiverN) by ~10% (roughly equivalent to turning off the atmospheric deposition), and removing the nitrogen fluxes from the continental shelf (CoastalN). (Right) Relative impacts of the three nitrogen modification scenarios on summertime bottom DO.

These results indicate that two often-neglected sources of nitrogen—direct atmospheric deposition and fluxes of nitrogen from the continental shelf—substantially impact Chesapeake Bay DO, especially in the summer. Future study is needed to investigate the long-term trend of these relative impacts by continued coordination between modeling and observational work, such as applying higher-resolution atmospheric deposition products and integrating more in situ data along the model ocean boundary when they are available. These efforts will improve our understanding of the impacts of different nutrient sources on biogeochemical cycles in coastal water bodies.

Authors:
Fei Da (VIMS, College of William & Mary)
Marjorie A. M. Friedrichs (VIMS, College of William & Mary)
Pierre St-Laurent (VIMS, College of William & Mary)

When it comes to carbon export, the mesoscale matters

Posted by hbenway

· Tuesday, September 11th, 2018

Figure 1. Difference in annual mean carbon export (ΔPOC flux) between a high resolution (0.1º, Hi-res) and standard resolution (1º, Analog) global climate model simulation using the CESM model. Highlighted regions show areas where vertical (purple boxes) and horizontal (red boxes) changes in nutrient transport drive increases or decreases in export, respectively.

Most Earth System models (ESMs) that are used to study global climate and the carbon cycle do not resolve the most energetic scales in the ocean, the mesoscale (10-100 km), encompassing eddies, coastal jets, and other dynamic features strongly affecting nutrient delivery, productivity, and carbon export. This prompts the question: What are we missing in climate models by not resolving the mesoscale?

Authors of a recent study published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles conducted a comparative analysis of the importance of mesoscale features in biological production and associated carbon export using standard resolution (1°) and mesoscale-resolving (0.1°) ESM simulations. The mesoscale-resolving ESM yielded only a ~2% reduction in globally integrated export production relative to the standard resolution ESM. However, a closer look at the local processes driving export in different basins revealed much larger, compensating differences (Fig. 1). For example, in regions where biological production is driven by natural iron fertilization from shelf sediment sources (Fig. 2), improved representation of coastal jets in the higher-resolution ESM reduces the cross-shelf iron delivery that fuels production (red boxes in Fig. 1). Resolving mesoscale turbulence further reduces the spatial extent of blooms and associated export, yielding a more patchy distribution than in the coarse resolution models. Together, these processes lead to a reduction in export in the Argentine Basin, one of the most productive regions on the planet, of locally up to 50%. In contrast, resolving the mesoscale results in enhanced export production in the Subantarctic (purple box in Fig. 1), where the mesoscale model resolves deeper, narrower mixed layer depths that support stronger nutrient entrainment, in turn enhancing local productivity and export.

Figure 2. An iron-driven plankton bloom structured by mesoscale features in the South Atlantic. Left is simulated dissolved iron (Fe), the limiting nutrient for this region, and right is iron in all phytoplankton classes, a proxy for biomass (phytoFe, shown in log10 scale), on January 11, the height of the bloom. Plankton blooms in the Subantarctic Atlantic are fueled by horizontal iron transport off coastal and island shelves and vertical injection from seamounts, whereas farther south in the Southern Ocean, winter vertical mixing is the primary driver of iron delivery. Mesoscale circulation, largely an unstructured mix of interacting jets and vortices, strongly affects the location and timing of carbon production and export. Click here for an animation.

In regions with very short productivity seasons like the North Pacific and Subantarctic, internally generated mesoscale variability (captured in the higher resolution ESM) yields significant interannual variation in local carbon export. In these regions, a few eddies, filaments or more amorphous mesoscale features can structure the entire production and export pattern for the short bloom season. These findings document the importance of resolving mesoscale features in ESMs to more accurately quantify carbon export, and the different roles mesoscale variability can play in different oceanographic settings.

Determining how to best sample these mesoscale turbulence-dominated blooms and scale up these measurements to regional and longer time means, is an outstanding joint challenge for modelers and observationalists. A key piece is obtaining the high temporal and spatial resolution data sets needed for validating modeled carbon export in bloom regions strongly impacted by mesoscale dynamics, which represent a large portion of the global carbon export.

Authors
Cheryl Harrison (NCAR, University of Colorado Boulder)
Matthew Long (NCAR)
Nicole Lovenduski (University of Colorado Boulder)
J. Keith Moore (University of California Irvine)

Shelf-wide pCO2 increase across the South Atlantic Bight

Posted by mmaheigan

· Thursday, August 2nd, 2018

Relative to their surface area, coastal regions represent some of the largest carbon fluxes in the global ocean, driven by numerous physical, chemical and biological processes. Coastal systems also experience human impacts that affect carbon cycling, which has large socioeconomic implications. The highly dynamic nature of these systems necessitates observing approaches and numerical methods that can both capture high-frequency variability and delineate long-term trends.

Figure 1: The South Atlantic Bight (SAB) was divided into four sections using isobaths: the coastal zone (0 to 15 m), the inner shelf (15 to 30 m), the middle shelf (30 to 60 m), and the outer shelf (60 m and beyond). The X’s indicate the locations of the Gray’s Reef mooring (southern X) and the Edisto mooring (northern X).

In two recent studies using mooring- and ship-based ocean CO₂ system data, authors observed that pCO₂ is increasing from the coastal zone to the outer shelf of the South Atlantic Bight at rates greater than the global average oceanic and atmospheric increase (~1.8 µatm y^-1). In recent publications in Continental Shelf Research and JGR-Oceans, the authors analyzed pCO₂ data from 46 cruises (1991-2016) using a novel linear regression technique to remove the seasonal signal, revealing an increase in pCO₂ of 3.0-3.7 µatm y^-1on the outer and inner shelf, respectively. Using a Generalized Additive Mixed Model (GAMM) approach for trend analysis, authors observed that the rates of increase were slightly higher than the deseasonalization technique, yielding pCO₂ increases of 3.3 to 4.5 µatm y^-1 on the outer and inner shelf, respectively. The reported pCO₂ increases result in potential pH decreases of -0.003 to -0.004 units y^-1.

Figure 2: The time series of fCO2 in the four regions of the SAB (cruise observations) and from the Gray’s Reef mooring on the inner shelf indicate an increase across the shelf. These data are the observed values, however, the trend lines for each time series are calculated using deseasonalized values using the reference year method.

Analysis of the pCO₂ time-series from the Gray’s Reef mooring (using a NOAA Moored Autonomous pCO₂ system from July 2006 -July 2015) yielded a rate of increase (3.5 ± 0.9 µatm y^-1) that was comparable to the cruise data on the inner shelf (3.7 ± 2.2 and 4.5 ± 0.6 µatm y^-1, linear and GAMM methods, respectively). Validation data collected at the mooring suggest that underway data from cruises and the moored data are comparable. Neither thermal processes nor atmospheric dissolution (the primary driver of oceanic acidification) can explain the observed pCO₂ increase and concurrent pH decrease across the shelf. Unlike the middle and outer shelves, where an increase in SST could account for up to 1.1 µatm y^-1 of the observed pCO₂ trend, there is no thermal influence in the coastal zone and inner shelf. While 1.8 µatm y^-1 could be attributed to the global average atmospheric increase, the remainder is likely due to transport from coastal marshes and in situ biological processes. As the authors have shown, the increasing coastal and oceanic trend in pCO₂ can lead to a decrease in pH, especially if there is no increase in buffering capacity. More acidic waters can have a long term affect on coastal ecosystem services and biota.

Also see Eos Editor’s Vox on this research by Peter Brewer https://eos.org/editors-vox/coastal-ocean-warming-adds-to-co2-burden

Authors:

Multidecadal fCO2 Increase Along the United States Southeast Coastal Margin (JGR-Oceans)
Janet J. Reimer (University of Delaware)
Hongjie Wang (Texas A &M University – Corpus Christi)
Rodrigo Vargas (University of Delaware)
Wei-Jun Cai (University of Delaware)

And

Time series pCO2 at a coastal mooring: Internal consistency, seasonal cycles, and interannual variability (Continental Shelf Research)
Janet J. Reimer (University of Delaware)
Wei-Jun Cai (University of Delaware; University of Georgia)
Liang Xue (University of Delaware; First Institute of Oceanography, China)
Rodrigo Vargas (University of Delaware)
Scott Noakes (University of Georgia)
Xinping Hu (Texas A &M University – Corpus Christi)
Sergio R. Signorini (Science Applications International Corporation)
Jeremy T. Mathis (NOAA Arctic Research Program)
Richard A. Feely (NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory)
Adrienne J. Sutton (NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory; University of Washington)
Christopher Sabine (University of Hawaii Manoa)
Sylvia Musielewicz (NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory; University of Washington)
Baoshan Chen (University of Delaware; University of Georgia)
Rik Wanninkhof (NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory)

Long-term coastal data sets reveal unifying relationship between oxygen and pH fluctuations

Posted by mmaheigan

· Thursday, June 7th, 2018

Coastal habitats are critically important to humans, but without consistent and reliable observations we cannot understand the direction and magnitude of unfolding changes in these habitats. Environmental monitoring is therefore a prescient—yet still undervalued—societal service, and no effort better exemplifies this than the work conducted within the National Estuarine Research Reserve System (NERRS). NERRS is a network of 29 U.S. estuarine sites operated as a partnership between NOAA and the coastal states. NERRS has established a system-wide monitoring program with standardized instrumentation, protocols, and data reporting to guide consistent and comparable data collection across all NERRS sites. This has resulted in high-quality, comparable data on short- to long-term changes in water quality and biological systems to inform effective coastal zone management.

Figure 1: Using dissolved oxygen and salinity, monthly mean pH can be predicted within and across coastal systems due to the unifying metabolic coupling of oxygen and pH.

In a recent study published in Estuaries and Coasts, Baumann and Smith (2017) used a subset of this unique data set to analyze short- and long-term variability in pH and dissolved oxygen (DO) at 16 NERRS sites across the U.S. Atlantic, Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and Pacific coasts (> 5 million data points). They observed that large, metabolically driven fluctuations of pH and DO are indeed a unifying feature of nearshore habitats. Furthermore, mean pH or mean diel pH fluctuations can be predicted across habitats simply from salinity and oxygen levels/fluctuations (Fig.1). These results provide strong empirical evidence that common metabolic principles drive diel to seasonal pH and DO variations within and across a diversity of estuarine environments. As expected, the study did not yield interannual, monotonic trends in nearshore pH conditions; rather, interannual fluctuations were of similar magnitude to the pH decrease predicted for the average surface ocean over the next three centuries (Fig.2). Correlations of weekly anomalies of pH, oxygen, and temperature yielded strong empirical support for the hypothesis that coastal acidification—in addition to being driven by eutrophication and atmospheric CO₂ increases—is exacerbated by warming, likely via increased community respiration.

Figure 2: Interannual variations in temperature, pH, and dissolved oxygen (DO) anomalies in 16 NERRS sites across the US Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean, and Pacific coasts.

Analyses of these long-term data sets have provided important insights on biogeochemical variability and underlying drivers in nearshore environments, highlighting the value and utility of long-term monitoring efforts like NERRS. Sustained, high-quality data sets in these nearshore environments are essential for the study of environmental change and should be prioritized by funding agencies. The observed metabolically driven pH and DO fluctuations suggest that local measures to reduce nutrient pollution can be an effective management tool in support of healthy coastal environments, a boon for both the habitats and humans.

Authors:
Hannes Baumann (University of Connecticut)
Erik M. Smith (North Inlet-Winyah Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, University of South Carolina)

Funding for the Ocean Carbon & Biogeochemistry Project Office is provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The OCB Project Office is housed at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

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