Importance of Teal Carbon to Wetland Carbon Monitoring and Assessment
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Wetlands contain a disproportionate amount of the earth’s total soil carbon, holding more than a quarter of the global soil carbon despite occupying less than a tenth of the land surface (Mitsch & Gosselink 2007). Despite that there are 35.7 million hectares of inland freshwater wetlands in the U.S. compared to 2.7 million hectares of tidal saline wetlands, our understanding of carbon stored in inland freshwater wetlands is comparatively limited. 2011 marked the first National Wetland Condition Assessment (or the NWCA) – a field-based survey coordinated by the EPA in partnership with states and tribes to collect data from wetlands across the conterminous U.S. every five years. The soil dataset, in particular, collected as part of the NWCA presented us with an opportunity to investigate the distribution of carbon in both inland freshwater and tidal saline wetlands across the U.S. Siobhan Fennessy and I reported the results of this effort in a 2016 Nature Communications article. We found that, although tidal saline wetlands hold more carbon at the site-level, the population of inland freshwater wetlands holds more than 10 times the carbon compared to the population of tidal saline wetlands because of their different areal extent on the landscape. The attention that we brought to the fact that inland freshwater wetlands are an often-overlooked reservoir of carbon on the landscape inspired the CMS project Teal Carbon – Stakeholder-Driven Monitoring of Forested Wetland Carbon being conducted at the University of Washington’s Precision Forestry Cooperative. This project addresses several scientific advancements that are needed in the wetland carbon community. In this “Oceans and Wet Carbon” panel discussion, the benefits of data produced from the Teal Carbon and future needs of the wetland carbon community in carbon monitoring will be discussed.