Do ENSO and Coastal Development Enhance Coastal Burial of Terrestrial Carbon?

Carbon cycling on the east coast of Australia has the potential to be strongly affected by El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) intensification and coastal development (industrialization and urbanization). We performed paleoreconstructions of estuarine sediments from a seagrass-dominated estuary on t...

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Main Authors:	Macreadie, Peter I., Rolph, Timothy C., Boyd, Ron, Schröder-Adams, Claudia J., Skilbeck, Charles G.
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Public Library of Science 2015
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4686213/

id	pubmed-4686213
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-46862132016-01-07 Do ENSO and Coastal Development Enhance Coastal Burial of Terrestrial Carbon? Macreadie, Peter I. Rolph, Timothy C. Boyd, Ron Schröder-Adams, Claudia J. Skilbeck, Charles G. Research Article Carbon cycling on the east coast of Australia has the potential to be strongly affected by El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) intensification and coastal development (industrialization and urbanization). We performed paleoreconstructions of estuarine sediments from a seagrass-dominated estuary on the east coast of Australia (Tuggerah Lake, New South Wales) to test the hypothesis that millennial-scale ENSO intensification and European settlement in Australia have increased the transfer of organic carbon from land into coastal waters. Our data show that carbon accumulation rates within coastal sediments increased significantly during periods of maximum millennial-scale ENSO intensity (“super-ENSO”) and coastal development. We suggest that ENSO and coastal development destabilize and liberate terrestrial soil carbon, which, during rainfall events (e.g., La Niña), washes into estuaries and becomes trapped and buried by coastal vegetation (seagrass in this case). Indeed, periods of high carbon burial were generally characterized as having rapid sedimentation rates, higher content of fine-grained sediments, and increased content of wood and charcoal fragments. These results, though preliminary, suggest that coastal development and ENSO intensification—both of which are predicted to increase over the coming century—can enhance capture and burial of terrestrial carbon by coastal ecosystems. These findings have important relevance for current efforts to build an understanding of terrestrial-marine carbon connectivity into global carbon budgets. Public Library of Science 2015-12-21 /pmc/articles/PMC4686213/ /pubmed/26691557 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0145136 Text en © 2015 Macreadie et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Macreadie, Peter I. Rolph, Timothy C. Boyd, Ron Schröder-Adams, Claudia J. Skilbeck, Charles G.
spellingShingle	Macreadie, Peter I. Rolph, Timothy C. Boyd, Ron Schröder-Adams, Claudia J. Skilbeck, Charles G. Do ENSO and Coastal Development Enhance Coastal Burial of Terrestrial Carbon?
author_facet	Macreadie, Peter I. Rolph, Timothy C. Boyd, Ron Schröder-Adams, Claudia J. Skilbeck, Charles G.
author_sort	Macreadie, Peter I.
title	Do ENSO and Coastal Development Enhance Coastal Burial of Terrestrial Carbon?
title_short	Do ENSO and Coastal Development Enhance Coastal Burial of Terrestrial Carbon?
title_full	Do ENSO and Coastal Development Enhance Coastal Burial of Terrestrial Carbon?
title_fullStr	Do ENSO and Coastal Development Enhance Coastal Burial of Terrestrial Carbon?
title_full_unstemmed	Do ENSO and Coastal Development Enhance Coastal Burial of Terrestrial Carbon?
title_sort	do enso and coastal development enhance coastal burial of terrestrial carbon?
description	Carbon cycling on the east coast of Australia has the potential to be strongly affected by El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) intensification and coastal development (industrialization and urbanization). We performed paleoreconstructions of estuarine sediments from a seagrass-dominated estuary on the east coast of Australia (Tuggerah Lake, New South Wales) to test the hypothesis that millennial-scale ENSO intensification and European settlement in Australia have increased the transfer of organic carbon from land into coastal waters. Our data show that carbon accumulation rates within coastal sediments increased significantly during periods of maximum millennial-scale ENSO intensity (“super-ENSO”) and coastal development. We suggest that ENSO and coastal development destabilize and liberate terrestrial soil carbon, which, during rainfall events (e.g., La Niña), washes into estuaries and becomes trapped and buried by coastal vegetation (seagrass in this case). Indeed, periods of high carbon burial were generally characterized as having rapid sedimentation rates, higher content of fine-grained sediments, and increased content of wood and charcoal fragments. These results, though preliminary, suggest that coastal development and ENSO intensification—both of which are predicted to increase over the coming century—can enhance capture and burial of terrestrial carbon by coastal ecosystems. These findings have important relevance for current efforts to build an understanding of terrestrial-marine carbon connectivity into global carbon budgets.
publisher	Public Library of Science
publishDate	2015
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4686213/
_version_	1613515119915958272

Do ENSO and Coastal Development Enhance Coastal Burial of Terrestrial Carbon?

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