Loss-On-Ignition Estimates for Soil Organic Carbon in Great Lakes Freshwater Coastal Wetlands
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GENERAL WETLAND SCIENCE
Loss-On-Ignition Estimates for Soil Organic Carbon in Great Lakes Freshwater Coastal Wetlands Katherine N. Braun 1,2 & Ethan J. Theuerkauf 3
&
Matthew T. Hurtgen 2 & Andrew L. Masterson 2 & Daniel E. Horton 2
Received: 22 November 2019 / Accepted: 27 January 2020 # Society of Wetland Scientists 2020
Abstract Soil organic carbon (SOC) is an important component of freshwater wetlands that may be used to quantify ecosystem services and prioritize conservation efforts. Measuring SOC directly via elemental analysis is often time and cost-prohibitive. Loss-onignition (LOI) is a rapid and low-cost method for determining soil organic matter; however, LOI data must be converted to SOC data using a soil type-specific regression model and no models currently exist for freshwater coastal wetlands. To address this gap, we performed regression analyses that convert percent organic matter measured from LOI to SOC for freshwater coastal wetlands in the southern basin of Lake Michigan. Analyses across 6 Lake Michigan wetlands provide a regression model capable of estimating SOC within ±3.5% uncertainty (r2 = 0.757), a threshold useful for wetland management and large-scale soil surveys. Future research should explore the LOI-SOC relationship at other freshwater coastal wetlands – to investigate whether the correlation values found here are typical of these systems and to refine our regression model using data from disparate freshwater locales. Keywords Wetland . Soil organic carbon . Great Lakes . Loss-on-ignition . Freshwater coastal wetlands . Temperate wetlands
Introduction Soils contain Earth’s largest pool of terrestrial organic carbon, storing an estimated 2500 Pg C (Lal 2004). Since the industrial revolution, soil carbon erosion and oxidation has released 78 ± 12 Pg C to the atmosphere, accounting for ~29% of modern global carbon emissions (Lal 2004). Soil organic carbon (SOC) stabilizes the soil matrix, stores water, acts as a source and sink of plant nutrients, and, in wetlands, aids in the vertical accretion of wetland material (Lal 2004; DeLaune and White 2012). The quantification of SOC is valuable for a variety of scientific purposes, e.g., understanding the global * Ethan J. Theuerkauf [email protected] 1
Illinois State Geological Survey, Prairie Research Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 615 E Peabody Drive, Champaign, IL 61820, USA
2
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Northwestern University, 2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208, USA
3
Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences, Michigan State University, 673 Auditorium Road, East Lansing, MI 48825, USA
carbon cycle (Smith 2008), understanding the value of soils as an ecosystem service for management decisions, and for carbon credit trading (Lal 2004). Wetlands are a major global sink for SOC, storing 455 to 700 Pg C, which accounts for 20–30% of the total soil carbon pool on Earth (Mitsch and Gosselink 2015). Temperate wetlands, such as those throughout the Laurentian Great Lakes, ar
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