New England’s Salt Marsh stores carbon in 10 million cars and adds another 15,000 cars each year.

In the race to combat global climate change, a lot of attention is paid to natural carbon sinks. It is primarily in the terrestrial regions of the Earth that absorb and sequester more carbon than it emits. Scientists have long known that coastal salt marshlands are “blue carbon” or carbon-like sinks stored in marine and coastal ecosystems, but how much of them are stored It was difficult to accurately estimate whether this was the case. The focus is on terrestrial sinks such as forests and grasslands.

Now, a team of scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst University is debuting a new, highly accurate method for quantifying carbon capture in salt marshlands in the northeast.

Their work shows that salt marsh stores around 10 million cars of carbon in the soil at the top, suggesting that salt marsh adds around 15,000 additional cars each year . The results published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences are key steps to meeting the global challenges of global warming.

Oceans store almost a third of their carbon footprint, and have a growing global reputation for the role that coastal ecosystems like salt marsh can play as carbon sinks.

“From a climate standpoint, there’s something amazing about Tidal Marshes,” says Wenxiu Teng, a PhD author and the lead author of The Paper. The candidate for Earth, Geography and Climate Science (EGC) for UMass Amherst said, “They can continuously increase carbon storage. They will not be satisfied.”

This is because new layers of waves, tides, tides, storms, storms, and carbon-closed sediments are continuously stored in thick salt marsh. Furthermore, as the glacier continues to melt, salt marsh grows vertically and stores more carbon to keep up with sea level rise.

“Salt swamps are much more sustainable carbon sinks than forests and other ground locations,” says Massachusetts geologist Brian Yellen, an assistant research professor at UMass Amherst and co-author of the paper. One of them says. “There are a lot of people who are excited about the technical solutions to scrub carbon from the atmosphere, but there’s something natural here and it’s working really well now. It’s scalable in other parts of the world. method.”

There are also warnings for team work. That means that the equivalent of 10 million cars is also a potential carbon bomb. When salt marsh is disrupted or natural processes change, they can release all of the greenhouse gases that exacerbate climate change, rather than helping to mitigate naturally.

“If salty wetlands deteriorate due to a combination of local environmental stressors and the threat of global climate change,” Yellen says.

To understand how much blue carbon salt wetlands can accommodate, scientists need a baseline of both the amount already stored and the exact way to measure the rate at which wetlands can sequester carbon. Masu. Both are very difficult to identify as the wetlands themselves are highly variable ecosystems with diverse storage rates. The ideal is to take soil samples from every metre in every wetland and measure the carbon stored therein. This is an exorbitantly expensive and time-consuming process.

Another option is to rely on satellite imagery, but Qian Yu, Associate Professor EGCS and one of the satellites co-authors of the paper, can see the carbon stored in the salt marsh deposits themselves. you can’t. However, the satellites can see the various water depths and vegetation throughout the wetlands. This is two main factors that promote wetland soil formation and carbon storage. Using a common tool from the world of satellite remote sensing called the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), the team investigates spatial patterns of water depth and nutrient vitality to map soil differences between wetlands. did. However, NDWIs fluctuate constantly with seasonal vegetation growth and tidal changes.

What the team realized they needed to do was to compare satellite NDWI data for multiple seasons with satellite NDWI data for different tide levels with robust samples of salt marsh sediment collected in the field. . Collect 410 samples representing multiple locations in the Gulf of Maine and each salt marsh.

“We started looking at satellite data plotted against field samples. There was this ‘a-ha!’ Instant,” Yellen says. The team was able to clearly see that there were specific tidal conditions and timings in which satellite data closely tracked the data collected in the field.

“It’s really about flooding at high tides, that is, when you want to have the satellites take pictures,” Yellen says.

After the team knows which type of satellite imagery is the most reliable, they can find specific images focused on the northeast coast, and use them to store and store these wetlands. It is possible to generate the most accurate estimates of blue carbon that continue to be.

“Salt wetlands alone cannot explain all the carbon we are currently releasing into the atmosphere,” Yellen says. It just decarbonizes the economy.

“These salt marshes are a very important ecosystem for all kinds of reasons,” says Teng. “Now we know they’re rich not only in terms of biodiversity, but also in terms of helping the planet survive the worst climate change.”

Professors John Woodruff and Bonnie Tulek of EGCS contributed to this study as part of their graduate studies at UMass Amherst, and are also co-authors.