If you can’t measure it, you can't manage it!
High-quality field data on wetlands are essential for managing these important environments, but wetlands are inherently difficult to study. USGS scientists published a practical guide to measuring where wetland carbon is stored (carbon pools) and how it moves through time (carbon fluxes).
The guide aims to increase the speed of high-quality data collection and reduce the time lag to get those data interpreted for management-relevant applications.
Help Needed from Wetlands
Shortened winters, increased extreme events, and rising sea levels are just a few ways climate change is impacting people’s lives around the world. Concerted international efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions need every tool available to slow and reverse the pace of climate change, including nature-based solutions. Nature-based solutions are a way to solve problems by using nature as a tool.
Wetlands are one such nature-based solution because of their ability to sequester and store carbon, having a cooling effect on climate. However, wetlands also emit methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Wetlands’ dual role on climate makes their management for climate benefits complex, delicate, and potentially risky. The highest quality field data on wetland carbon and greenhouse gas dynamics are essential, but also the bottleneck to making well-informed decisions. In short, ‘if you can't measure it, you can't manage it'.
Challenges to Overcome
Watery environments are inherently difficult to study. Wetland soils are often fluidic and slide out of traditional coring devices. Water volumes and chemistry are influenced by dynamic mixing of groundwater, porewater, and surface water in wetlands. Greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide are often emitted in seemingly random patterns from wetlands. And vegetation may float from one location to another over the course of a day of field work.
All of this variability means researchers often use different measurement techniques in their studies, making it hard to make comparisons among studies and apply these data to management decisions.
Innovative Solutions
Clever wetland scientists worldwide, including many in the USGS, have developed new techniques and technologies to overcome the sampling challenges posed by wetlands. Many of these techniques have stood the test of time and are now standard practice for wetland researchers. These creative approaches for collecting and analyzing soil, water, plant, and gas samples at various spatial and temporal scales are often described during conference presentations and in peer-reviewed publication. But the nuances of those methods descriptions often lack the practical information and level of detail required by inexperienced researchers to replicate these methods in complex and challenging wetland environments.
Collaborative publication
After years of trial-and-error developing methodological protocols for his lab, USGS scientist Dr. Sheel Bansal reached out to his colleagues about writing an omnibus review paper that would focus on practical information for measuring wetland carbon: from the underlying theories to the financial costs and level of training required to carry out various methods. The paper, “Practical Guide to Measuring Wetland Carbon Pools and Fluxes,” was published in November 2023 as a single, open access, Mark Brinson Review in the journal Wetlands. The international authorship of ~70 early-, mid-, and late-career authors came from multiple government agencies, universities, and non-governmental organizations around the world. The manuscript topped 100,000 words, 30 figures, and 1,500 references, approximately equal to the length of 15 typical review papers!
Help Coming from Wetlands
It is vitally important to get the numbers right with new international agreements and national strategies to measure, monitor, and report carbon and greenhouse gas fluxes from both anthropogenic and natural sources. Wetland carbon and greenhouse gas pools and fluxes have been and will continue to be a vitally important component of the Earth’s climate. High-quality field data on wetlands are essential for managing these important environments. By compiling the best-available methods in one easy-to-use publication for wetland scientists, the Practical Guide to Measuring Wetland Carbon Pools and Fluxes aims to increase the speed and quality of data collection for managing wetlands as a nature-based solution.
Get Our News
These items are in the RSS feed format (Really Simple Syndication) based on categories such as topics, locations, and more. You can install and RSS reader browser extension, software, or use a third-party service to receive immediate news updates depending on the feed that you have added. If you click the feed links below, they may look strange because they are simply XML code. An RSS reader can easily read this code and push out a notification to you when something new is posted to our site.