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hubie writes:

Land-Building Marsh Plants are Champions of Carbon Capture:

Human activities such as marsh draining for agriculture and logging are increasingly eating away at saltwater and freshwater wetlands that cover only 1% of Earth's surface but store more than 20% of all the climate-warming carbon dioxide absorbed by ecosystems worldwide.

A new study published May 5 in Science by a team of Dutch, American and German scientists shows that it's not too late to reverse the losses.

The key to success, the paper's authors say, is using innovative restoration practices -- identified in the new paper -- that replicate natural landscape-building processes and enhance the restored wetlands' carbon-storing potential.

And doing it on a large scale.

[...] "More than half of all wetland restorations fail because the landscape-forming properties of the plants are insufficiently taken into account," said study coauthor Tjisse van der Heide of the Royal Institute for Sea Research and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Planting seedlings and plugs in orderly rows equidistant from each other may seem logical, but it's counter-productive, he said.

"Restoration is much more successful when the plants are placed in large dense clumps, when their landscape-forming properties are mimicked, or simply when very large areas are restored in one go," van der Heide said.

"Following this guidance will allow us to restore lost wetlands at a much larger scale and increase the odds that they will thrive and continue to store carbon and perform other vital ecosystem services for years to come," Silliman said. "The plants win, the planet wins, we all win."

Journal Reference:
R.J.M. Temmink, L.P.M. Lamers, C. Angelini, et al., Recovering Wetland Biogeomorphic Feedbacks to Restore the World's Biotic Carbon Hotspots, Science, 2022.
DOI: 10.1126/science.abn1479

Original Submission