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Contributed Talk

Session: : Biogeochemistry: Biogeo Patterns Along Environmental Gradients 2

COS 228-1 - Challenges and opportunities for monitoring and modeling ecosystem management as a nature-based climate solution along a dryland to wetland spectrum

Thursday, August 10, 2023
8:00 AM – 8:15 AM PDT
Location: B116
Abstract: Plans for nature-based climate solutions (NCS) in the United States point toward multiple land management actions that increase carbon sequestration and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. GHG monitoring is urgently needed for the NCS actions, as the public, land managers, and policy makers need to know if current actions are effective or ineffective as NCS, as well as to inform and prioritize future NCS. Soil-based NCS actions are especially encouraged on public lands, which are comprised largely of hydrologic endmember ecosystems: drylands and wetlands. For instance, of the roughly 170 million hectares of federal land managed by the Department of the Interior, nearly 100 million are drylands, while shrublands and wetlands each comprise more than 27% of land in the National Wildlife Refuge system. These endmembers are generally underrepresented in existing GHG models and measurements. For example, upland management may change the flow of allochthonous carbon into downslope wetlands, changing their GHG emission rates, a landscape linkage missing from most terrestrial ecosystem models. Likewise, large exports of carbon from wetlands into adjacent water bodies are missed by flux measurements with a “vertical bias” such as eddy-covariance and chamber-based approaches. Dryland biocrusts have a large impact on carbon and nutrient cycles but also have not been well represented in most terrestrial ecosystem models. Some of the very same features of drylands and wetlands that generate interest in their management as an NCS make it difficult to measure and model the climate impacts of such actions, including: (1) deep stores of soil carbon, (2) dynamic hydrology near the soil surface, (3) lateral fluxes of dissolved and particulate carbon, (4) large non-CO2 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and (5) the roles of non-vascular periphyton in carbon cycling (e.g., algae and biocrusts). This presentation will provide specific examples of each of these challenges from recent research. We also will present a model-informed prototype framework for GHG accounting across a dryland-to-wetland ecosystem portfolio for monitoring, projection, and prioritization of federal NCS actions on public lands.