ORCID

0000-0003-2422-3252 (Tamborski)

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

DOI

10.1038/s43247-024-01621-2

Publication Title

Communications Earth & Environment

Volume

5

Issue

1

Pages

437 (1-9)

Abstract

Fiddler crabs, as coastal ecosystem engineers, play a crucial role in enhancing biodiversity and accelerating the flow of material and energy. Here we show how widespread crab burrows modify the carbon sequestration capacity of different habitats across a large climatic gradient. The process of crab burrowing results in the reallocation of sediment organic carbon and humus. Crab burrows can increase more greenhouse gases emissions compared to the sediment matrix (CO2: by 17-30%; CH4: by 49-141%). Straightforward calculations indicate that these increased emissions could offset 35-134% of sediment carbon burial in these two ecosystems. This research highlights the complex interactions between crab burrows, habitat type, and climate which reveal a potential lower carbon sink function of blue carbon ecosystems than previously expected without considering crab burrows. Bioturbation in wetlands can increase carbon dioxide and methane emissions, partially offsetting their sediment carbon burial capacity, according to a large-scale data set from sediment samples collected along the Chinese coastline and laboratory incubations.

Rights

© The Authors 2024.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Data Availability

Article states: "The source data underlying all the figures in the main article and supplementary information that support the findings of this study are available in “figshare” with the link (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.25347760.v3). Specifically, it includes field sampling data (SOC, HFOC, LFOC, HU, FA, HA, environmental variables) and incubation experiment data (enzyme activity, greenhouse gas emission rate, greenhouse gas cumulative flux)."

Original Publication Citation

Xiao, K., Wu, Y. C., Pan, F., Huang, Y. R., Peng, H. B., Lu, M. Q., Zhang, Y., Li, H. L., Zheng, Y., Zheng, C. M., Liu, Y., Chen, N. W., Xiao, L. L., Han, G. X., Li, Y. S., Xin, P., Li, R. L., Xu, B. C., Wang, F. M., . . . Santos, I. R. (2024). Widespread crab burrows enhance greenhouse gas emissions from coastal blue carbon ecosystems [Article]. Communications Earth & Environment, 5(1), 1-9, Article 437. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01621-2

Additional Files
TamborskiPeerReview.pdf (518 kB)
Peer Review File
Tamborski-SupplementaryInformation.pdf (3080 kB)
Supplementary Information
TamborskiReportingSummary.pdf (2197 kB)
Reporting Summary
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