Carbon-scapes: Understanding carbon connectivity across the land-ocean continuum using a seascape approach

Globally, intertidal (Blue Carbon) and subtidal sedimentary environments provide a nature-based solution (NbS) to climate change through the capture and long-term storage of organic carbon (OC). In Scotland it is estimated that subtidal marine sediments store 178 +/- 36 Mt OC while saltmarsh and seagrass soils store 1.05 Mt OC and 0.088 Mt OC respectively.

Though these environments are clearly important both for OC storage and biodiversity, many of these ecosystems are under growing natural and anthropogenic pressure with seagrass and saltmarsh extent decreasing annually and marine sediments being regularly disturbed (e.g., trawling). The loss and disruption of these environments will reduce these ecosystems' ability to capture OC and will facilitate the release of stored OC to the wider environment and potentially back to the atmosphere, worsening the climate crisis.

Yet our ability to quantify the potential OC losses and the reduction in the magnitude of the climate regulation service provided by these habitats is limited as to date research has focused on the role that individual habitats play in the global carbon cycle and not the wider system (e.g., all ecosystems within an estuarine setting). In reality, all the ecosystems across the land-ocean interface are intrinsically linked to one another and the wider terrestrial and marine environments.

This project will use two contrasting estuaries (provisionally Dornoch Firth and Tyninghame Bay) as natural laboratories to explore OC interactions both spatially and temporally across the land-ocean interface (Carbon-scapes).