Title：Tidal wetland resilience to sea level rise increases their carbon sequestration capacity in United States
Journal/Publisher：Nature Communications
Year：2019
Authors：Faming Wang, Xiaoliang Lu, Christian J. Sanders& Jianwu Tang
Abstract
Coastal wetlands are large reservoirs of soil carbon (C). However, the annual C accumulationrates contributing to the C storage in these systems have yet to be spatially estimated on alarge scale. We synthesized C accumulation rate (CAR) in tidal wetlands of the conterminousUnited States (US), upscaled the CAR to national scale, and predicted trends based onclimate change scenarios. Here, we show that the mean CAR is 161.8 ± 6 g Cm−2yr−1, andthe conterminous US tidal wetlands sequestrate 4.2–5.0 Tg C yr−1. Relative sea level rise(RSLR) largely regulates the CAR. The tidal wetland CAR is projected to increase in thiscentury and continue their C sequestration capacity in all climate change scenarios, sug-gesting a strong resilience to sea level rise. These results serve as a baseline assessment of Caccumulation in tidal wetlands of US, and indicate a significant C sink throughout this century.