Potential Effect of Bioturbation by Burrowing Crabs on Sediment Parameters in Coastal Salt Marshes
- PDF / 3,012,961 Bytes
- 10 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 106 Downloads / 200 Views
DEGRADATION AND ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION OF ESTUARINE WETLANDS IN CHINA
Potential Effect of Bioturbation by Burrowing Crabs on Sediment Parameters in Coastal Salt Marshes Tian Xie 1,2
&
Peng Dou 3 & Shanze Li 4 & Baoshan Cui 1,2
&
Junhong Bai 1,2 & Qing Wang 1 & Zhonghua Ning 1
Received: 19 February 2020 / Accepted: 9 July 2020 # Society of Wetland Scientists 2020
Abstract Burrowing crabs are main constituent of estuarine wetlands ecosystems, and provide a variety of ecosystem functions including providing food for waterbirds and fishes, promoting nutrients cycling, and processing sediments deposition. Helice tientsinensis is the dominant crab species which inhabits almost the entire intertidal marshes of the Yellow River Delta. However, for a long time we ignored the crab bioturbation in this area. We know little about whether crabs have potential effects on sediment environment. Here, we investigated the crab burrow characteristics in three marsh zones, and we also analysed the sediment parameters among crab burrow mounds (chimneys), flats (flat areas between burrows), controls (outside of crab bed) and crab fecal deposit. We found that sediment was softer in crab burrow mounds than in flat and control areas. Higher crab density indicates softer sediment. Crab burrow mounds had saltier soil than the flats. Our results showed that sediment total nitrogen, total carbon and organic matter varied among mounds, flats, controls and crab fecal deposit, which indicated that crab bioturbation have potential effects on sediments redistribution and nutrients cycling. Our study is essential to clear the roles of crabs in ecosystems and will benefit for coastal saltmarsh protection and restoration. Keywords Crab burrow . Crab beds . Edaphic factors . Estuary . Yellow River Delta
Introduction Estuarine wetlands, occur in areas where rivers meet the open seas, have many ecosystem functions like water purification, shoreline stabilization, flood protection, as well as diversity maintenance (Mistch and Gosselin 2000; Finlayson et al. 2017). There are many chemical, physical and biological processes in estuarine wetland ecosystems (Finlayson et al. 2017). Sediment in coastal wetlands is usually disturbed by animal activities, which has been widely recognized as an * Baoshan Cui [email protected] 1
School of Environment, State Key Joint Laboratory of Environmental Simulation and Pollution Control, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
2
Yellow River Estuary Wetland Ecosystem Observation and Research Station, Ministry of Education, Shandong 257500, China
3
Department of Water Environment, Beijing Water Science and Technology Institute, Beijing 100048, China
4
Department of Water Environment, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing 100038, China
important indirect factor influencing the structure and dynamics of plant communities (Zhang et al. 2013) and benthic communities (Botto and Iribarne 1999; Alvarez et al. 2018). Burrowing species, like shrimps or crabs, are very common in in
Data Loading...
