Interactive effects of salinity, redox, and colloids on greenhouse gas production and carbon mobility in coastal wetland soils

Abstract

Coastal wetlands, including freshwater systems near large lakes, rapidly bury carbon, but less is known about how they transport carbon either to marine and lake environments or to the atmosphere as greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as carbon dioxide and methane. This study examines how GHG production and organic matter (OM) mobility in coastal wetland soils vary with the availability of oxygen and other terminal electron acceptors. We also evaluated how OM and redox-sensitive species varied across different size fractions: particulates (0.45–1μm), fine colloids (0.1–0.45μm), and nano particulates plus truly soluble (<0.1μm; NP+S) during 21-day aerobic and anaerobic slurry incubations. Soils were collected from the center of a freshwater coastal wetland (FW-C) in Lake Erie, the upland-wetland edge of the same wetland (FW-E), and the center of a saline coastal wetland (SW-C) in the Pacific Northwest, USA. Anaerobic methane production for FW-E soils were 47 and 27,537 times greater than FW-C and SW-C soils, respectively. High Fe2+ and dissolved sulfate concentrations in FW-C and SW-C soils suggest that iron and/or sulfate reduction inhibited methanogenesis. Aerobic CO2 production was highest for both freshwater soils, which had a higher proportion of OM in the NP+S fraction (64±28% and 70±10% for FW-C and FW-E, respectively) and organic C:N ratios reflective of microbial detritus (5.3±5.3 and 5.3±7.0 for FW-E and FW-C, respectively) compared to SW-C, which had a higher fraction of particulate (58±9%) and fine colloidal (19±7%) OM and organic C:N ratios reflective of vegetation detritus (11.4 ± 1.7). The variability in GHG production and shifts in OM size fractionation and composition observed across freshwater and saline soils collected within individual and across different sites reinforce the high spatial variability in the processes controlling OM stability, mobility, and bioavailability in coastal wetland soils.