Optimal soil carbon sampling designs to achieve cost-effectiveness: a case study in blue carbon ecosystems.

ABSTRACT: Researchers are increasingly studying carbon (C) storage by natural ecosystems for climate mitigation, including coastal 'blue carbon' ecosystems. Unfortunately, little guidance on how to achieve robust, cost-effective estimates of blue C stocks to inform inventories exists. We use existing data (492 cores) to develop recommendations on the sampling effort required to achieve robust estimates of blue C. Using a broad-scale, spatially explicit dataset from Victoria, Australia, we applied multiple spatial methods to provide guidelines for reducing variability in estimates of soil C stocks over large areas. With a separate dataset collected across Australia, we evaluated how many samples are needed to capture variability within soil cores and the best methods for extrapolating C to 1 m soil d

SUBMITTER: Young MA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6170757 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature