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Welcome to the first edition of CCC News. The Coastal Carbon Cluster was successfully launched on Friday 22 February at the University of Technology, Sydney by UTS Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Attila Brungs.

Cluster Management Committee: Dr Martina Doblin (UTS), Dr Stuart Phinn (UQ), Professor Peter Ralph (UTS), Dr Andy Steven (CSIRO) and Professor Carlos M. Duarte (UWA)

Understanding the important role of Australia’s coastal and marine wetlands in storing atmospheric carbon dioxide will be the focus of our $3 million Cluster. Over the next three years, the Cluster will create new models to collect information on blue carbon, a concept name for the capture and storage of atmospheric carbon in marine environments.

The Coastal Carbon Cluster is supported by the CSIRO Wealth from Oceans Flagship, the Flagship Collaboration Fund, and eight Australian research institutions: University of Technology, Sydney, University of Western Australia, University of Queensland, Griffith University, University of New South Wales, Australian Institute of Marine Science, Southern Cross University and Edith Cowan University. There are four workpackages in the Cluster and this first newsletter aims to introduce what each work package has achieved in the first six months.

Our quarterly newsletter is for clients, research partners and others who are interested in the Cluster's research. To subscribe, please email

Shannon.Hawkins@uts.edu.au or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Workpackage 1 — Carbon sequestration, stoichiometry and stores potential of representative Australian coastal ecosystemsThere is considerable interest in quantifying the capacity of the world's ecosystems to trap and store carbon, as this can offset anthropogenic carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Even though vegetated wetlands (seagrasses, mangroves, and salt marshes) occupy only two percent of the seabed area, these systems widely contribute to long-term carbon sequestration in the sediment. The exact amount of carbon stored by these ecosystems however, has been poorly examined and has now become an active area of research. The Coastal Carbon Cluster is unique in quantifying carbon storage in Australian coastal ecosystems and their potential to offset CO2 loading. This study is fundamentally important to national and global carbon accounting, and will allow for the testing and validation of current estimates of CO2 capture in coastal vegetated ecosystems.

The University of Western Australia Oceans Institute hosted the first workshop for this workpackage over two days in November 2012. The workshop proved to be highly beneficial as a set of standard methodologies was developed, opportunities identified, study sites and field campaigns were selected and a review of carbon stocks and burial in Australian vegetated coastal habitats initiated. As a result of this meeting, the protocols for analysing the organic and inorganic carbon (carbonate) stocks and accretion rates in vegetated coastal sediments have been standardised, together with protocols

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CCC NEWSAUSTRALIA’S LARGEST EVER COASTAL BLUE CARBON ACCOUNTING, MAPPING AND MEASUREMENT STUDY

CSIRO’s Coastal Carbon Cluster will foster vital scientific research to strengthen our low carbon economy and prevent future excessive greenhouse gas emissions.

CONTACT: Shannon Hawkins

Project Administrator Coastal Carbon Cluster

P 02 9514 1754E Shannon.Hawkins@uts.edu.au

W www.csiro.au/Coastal-Carbon-Cluster

F www.facebook.com/CoastalCarbonCluster

1 Posidonia or seagrass common to Australian waters.

2 Sampling advective benthic chambers in permeable carbonate sands on Heron Island.

3 Posidonia reef.

CCC NEWSAUSTRALIA’S LARGEST EVER COASTAL BLUE CARBON ACCOUNTING, MAPPING AND MEASUREMENT STUDY

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1 Posidonia

productivity estimates for coral reefs (chambers and EC) to integrate with existing carbonate monitoring and models.

During the first 6 months of the Cluster, Workpackage 2 has conducted a thorough and accurate literature review of existing bioturbation data. Bioturbation is the shifting and transference of the sediments of the sea floor caused by animal life, from tiny microbes to large mammals such as dugongs.

Bioturbation of seagrass beds is a very important but underinvestigated area in the study of Blue Carbon - in order to estimate Blue Carbon stocks, the rate of carbon loss from bioturbation must be able to accurately quantified and estimated.

Workpackage 2 has also recruited two new students, both of whom are working on seagrass bioturbators: Alex Thomson (PhD) is examining the impact of macrofauna moving carbon through the sediment profile and whether this alters the C stock or flux; Jessica Roy (Honours) is making estimates of the metabolic gas fluxes of bioturbators, using innovative sensor technologies in flow through chambers.

Work package 2 is also developing methodologies for measuring community metabolism using the eddy covariance technique. Over the past 3 months we have completed field campaigns with staff from CSIRO to Heron Island, Moreton Bay and Tweed River.

Workpackage 3 — Pelagic community metabolism in Australian coastal watersThis workpackage is structured around understanding pelagic carbon production and metabolism in Australian coastal waters. Workpackage 3 has delivered a national compilation of existing pelagic primary productivity (PP) estimates across Australian coastal and offshore waters. This compilation summarises the spatial and temporal distributions of these estimates, assessing the comparability of different methods (e.g. hourly versus daily 14C incubations, carbon uptake versus oxygen production; mg C m-2 d-1 versus mg C m-3 d-1) and identified knowledge gaps. While an initial assessment of the published literature reveals some of the study locations where PP measurements have been made [Figure 1], this preliminary evaluation also found a wide disparity in the use of different techniques (including time over which measurements are made and vertical integration methods) and

for dating sediment archives and analysing the isotopic signatures of sediment organic matter and carbonates.

Over the next 6 months, this workpackage has produced datasets compiled from existing data (literature review), and conducted several field surveys to assess burial rates and carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous stocks in sediments of seagrasses, salt marshes and mangroves. The initial results derived from Cluster research into carbon inventories, exchanges and sink rates in seagrass, salt marsh and mangrove sediments, has also been included in these datasets.

Workpackage 2 — Benthic community metabolism and benthic–pelagic coupling Existing models of benthic community metabolisms need measures of spatial and latitudinal variation, as well as physiological/ecological processes that affect biomass accumulation. Using continuous records of oxygen, fluorescence and eddy-covariance techniques ,Workpackage 2 will evaluate the primary production rates, net community metabolisms and ecological processes of seagrasses, macroalgae,

corals and biomass accumulation. Applying tracing methods, we will include

stable isotope and molecular methods (microbial impact)

to measure turnover rates in biomass

accumulation, benthic flux

and primary

in the units used for measuring and reporting PP estimates. Although this raises several challenges for making direct comparative assessments of regional PP estimates, the currently available dataset is nonetheless valuable and can be used in the development and assessment of satellite and biogeochemical models.

Figure 1: Location of sites where published PP data has

been collected around Australia.

In addition to the above-mentioned, this workpackage will attempt to configure the boundary conditions and carbonate chemistry for data-constrained DIC transport estimates. Workpackage 3 aims to use focused workshops, consultations and regular updates to support a close working interaction with CSIRO and other modellers to modify model parameters and improve regional and national estimates of pelagic carbon production and inorganic carbon stocks.

Workpackage 4 — Scaling up to regional inventories and data assimilation, and parameter and model uncertaintiesThe final work package has three main objectives that will be linked to deliver an improved ability to model biophysical processes in Australia’s coastal and estuarine environments. This means improving the data and equations used in CSIRO’s environmental modelling suite (EMS) to quantify changes in mangrove, seagrass and reef composition, structure and condition to provide more accurate estimates of how these environments change over time. The two main activities completed are:

1. Establishing an inventory of the most up-to-date

and detailed continental coastal maps of mangroves, inter- and sub-tidal benthic communities—including seagrass and coral reefs—and storing it for public access within the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network’s (TERN, www.tern.org.au) Australian Coastal Ecosystem Facility Data Portal (coastalresearch.csiro.au/).

2. Implementing a new seagrass growth program in EMS to more accurately model its growth, while also conducting a critical review of EMS and its biological parameters to determine if additional or new parameters can be added.

The three objectives that will then be addressed using this data are:

• Improving the model representation of carbon pools and fluxes in the CSIRO Environmental Modelling Suite (EMS) for application to estuarine and continental shelf environments around Australia.

• Delivering Australia-wide maps of seagrass, salt marshes, coral reefs and mangroves for use in the CSIRO Environmental Modelling Suite (EMS), based on available data, along with methods for integrating field data, modelled data image based maps to produce these maps and store them in a publicly accessible environmental data portal.

• Applying model-data fusion (MDF) techniques within EMS. These techniques will incorporate both transient biological phenomena (e.g. surface microalgae dynamics) and relatively stable (e.g. seagrass / mangrove ) processes for the purpose of improved hindcast simulations of focus regions.

Thank you for reading our first Coastal Carbon Cluster Newsletter. Please don't hesistate to contact Shannon.Hawkins@uts.edu.au if you would like to contribute.

If you are the owner(s) of any of the photos presented in this document please inform me so I can appropriately credit them.

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1 Saltmarsh

2 Out in the field