Losses and recovery of organic carbon from a seagrass ecosystem following disturbance
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Date
2015-10-21
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
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Publisher
The Royal Society Publishing
Abstract
Seagrasses are among the Earth's most efficient and long-term carbon sinks, but coastal development threatens this capacity. We report new evidence that disturbance to seagrass ecosystems causes release of ancient carbon. In a seagrass ecosystem that had been disturbed 50 years ago, we found that soil carbon stocks declined by 72%, which, according to radiocarbon dating, had taken hundreds to thousands of years to accumulate. Disturbed soils harboured different benthic bacterial communities (according to 16S rRNA sequence analysis), with higher proportions of aerobic heterotrophs compared with undisturbed. Fingerprinting of the carbon (via stable isotopes) suggested that the contribution of autochthonous carbon (carbon produced through plant primary production) to the soil carbon pool was less in disturbed areas compared with seagrass and recovered areas. Seagrass areas that had recovered from disturbance had slightly lower (35%) carbon levels than undisturbed, but more than twice as much as the disturbed areas, which is encouraging for restoration efforts. Slow rates of seagrass recovery imply the need to transplant seagrass, rather than waiting for recovery via natural processes. This study empirically demonstrates that disturbance to seagrass ecosystems can cause release of ancient carbon, with potentially major global warming consequences.© 2015, The Royal Society.
Description
Keywords
Losses, Carbon, Ecosystems, Earth planet, Isotope dating, Greenhouse effect
Citation
Macreadie, P. I., Trevathan-Tackett, S. M., Skibeck, C. G. Sanderman, J., Curleveski, N., Jacobsen, G. E., Seymour, J. R. (2015). Losses and recovery of organic carbon from a seagrass ecosystem following disturbance. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 282(1817), 20151537. doi:10.1098/rspb.2015.1537