Journal
PLOS ONE
Volume 7, Issue 8, Pages -Publisher
PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0038558
Keywords
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Categories
Funding
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Estuarine Research Reserve Graduate Research Fellowship [NA08NOS4200268]
- CA Environmental Quality Initiative
- Garden Club of America Coastal Wetlands scholarship
- University of California Santa Cruz: STEPS (Science, Technology, Engineering, Policy and Society Institute, at University of California, Santa Cruz)
- University of California Santa Cruz, STARS (Services for Transfer and Re-entry Students'' at University of California, Santa Cruz)
- Marilyn C. Davis Scholarship
- Center for Dynamics at the Land-Sea Interface
- Environmental Studies department
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Coastal salt marshes are among Earth's most productive ecosystems and provide a number of ecosystem services, including interception of watershed-derived nitrogen (N) before it reaches nearshore oceans. Nitrogen pollution and climate change are two dominant drivers of global-change impacts on ecosystems, yet their interacting effects at the land-sea interface are poorly understood. We addressed how sea-level rise and anthropogenic N additions affect the salt marsh ecosystem process of nitrogen uptake using a field-based, manipulative experiment. We crossed simulated sea-level change and ammonium-nitrate (NH4NO3)-addition treatments in a fully factorial design to examine their potentially interacting effects on emergent marsh plants in a central California estuary. We measured above-and belowground biomass and tissue nutrient concentrations seasonally and found that N-addition had a significant, positive effect on a) aboveground biomass, b) plant tissue N concentrations, c) N stock sequestered in plants, and d) shoot: root ratios in summer. Relative sea-level rise did not significantly affect biomass, with the exception of the most extreme sea-level-rise simulation, in which all plants died by the summer of the second year. Although there was a strong response to N-addition treatments, salt marsh responses varied by season. Our results suggest that in our site at Coyote Marsh, Elkhorn Slough, coastal salt marsh plants serve as a robust N trap and coastal filter; this function is not saturated by high background annual N inputs from upstream agriculture. However, if the marsh is drowned by rising seas, as in our most extreme sea-level rise treatment, marsh plants will no longer provide the ecosystem service of buffering the coastal ocean from eutrophication.
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