Plant Population Dynamics in a Degraded Coastal Wetland and Implications for the Carbon Cycle
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WETLANDS IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD
Plant Population Dynamics in a Degraded Coastal Wetland and Implications for the Carbon Cycle Yinrui Cheng 1,2,3,4
&
Yong Zha 1,2,3 & Chuan Tong 4 & Minjie Hu 5 & Dandan Du 6 & Yuexin Fan 4 & Lijuan Chen 1,2,3
Received: 27 August 2019 / Accepted: 20 January 2020 # Society of Wetland Scientists 2020
Abstract Habitat destruction caused by human activities is threatening wetland plants. Based on Landsat 5 TM, Landsat 8 OLI, and Google Earth images, we analysed the spatiotemporal dynamics of plant populations in a degraded wetland in the Minjiang River Estuary from 2009 to 2019. Field survey records, tasselled cap transformation, and supervised classification were used for the image interpretation. The results indicate that the plant habitat area decreased by 42.1% over these 10 years. Consequently, the distribution area of each dominant species declined, and the proportion of total vegetated area in the habitat decreased from 53.1% to 32.6%. Moreover, the dominance relations of the species changed from Spartina alterniflora > Phragmites australis > Cyperus malaccensis > Scirpus triqueter to P. australis > S. alterniflora > C. malaccensis > S. triqueter. We predict that the vegetation landscape in the wetland will be composed exclusively of P. australis and S. alterniflora if habitat destruction continues. Finally, our research shows that the NPCS (net plant carbon sequestration) and PCS (plant carbon stock) in the wetland and the average values of methane flux, NPCS, PCS, and SOCS (sediment organic carbon stock) in the vegetated area have all decreased due to plant population declines. Keywords Habitat destruction . Spartina alterniflora . Phragmites australis . Population dynamics . Carbon cycle
Introduction Wetlands provide habitats for numerous plant species (Bedford et al. 2013). However, habitat destruction caused by human activities is threatening wetland plants, with reports indicating that ~1.09% of the world’s natural wetland is * Yinrui Cheng [email protected] 1
School of Geography, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210023, China
2
Key Laboratory of Virtual Geographic Environment (Nanjing Normal University), Ministry of Education, Nanjing 210023, China
3
Jiangsu Center for Collaborative Innovation in Geographical Information Resource Development and Application, Nanjing 210023, China
4
School of Geography, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou 350007, China
5
College of the Environment and Ecology, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361102, China
6
College of Life Sciences, Anhui Normal University, Wuhu 241000, China
destroyed every year due to agriculture and industrial development (Davidson 2014), resulting in endangerment of many wetland-dependent plants (Niering 1988; Deane et al. 2017). Thus, monitoring plant population dynamics in degraded wetlands has great significance for species protection and wetland management. In addition, wetlands play an important role in the global carbon cycle. Previous studies have concluded that wetlands are the largest natural source
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