Can mud (silt and clay) concentration be used to predict soil organic carbon
content within seagrass ecosystems?

Serrano, Oscar; Lavery, Paul S.; Duarte, Carlos M.; Kendrick, Gary A.; Calafat, Antoni; York, Paul H.; Steven, Andy; Macreadie, Peter I.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-13-4915-2016

Articles | Volume 13, issue 17

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-13-4915-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-13-4915-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 13, issue 17

Research article

|

07 Sep 2016

Research article |

| 07 Sep 2016

Can mud (silt and clay) concentration be used to predict soil organic carbon content within seagrass ecosystems?

Oscar Serrano, Paul S. Lavery, Carlos M. Duarte, Gary A. Kendrick, Antoni Calafat, Paul H. York, Andy Steven, and Peter I. Macreadie

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Final revised paper (published on 07 Sep 2016)
Preprint (discussion started on 18 Jan 2016)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #1, 28 Jan 2016
RC2: 'Review report on the manuscript submitted to BiogeoSciences BG-2015-598 Serrano et al.', Martin Plus, 17 Feb 2016
- AC1: 'Response to reviewers', O. Serrano, 21 Apr 2016

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (24 Apr 2016) by Gwenaël Abril

AR by O. Serrano on behalf of the Authors (06 Jun 2016) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (06 Jun 2016) by Gwenaël Abril

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (30 Jun 2016)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

“Can mud (silt and clay) 1 concentration be used to predict soil organic carbon content within seagrass ecosystems?” by O. Serrano et al. bg-2015-598

Overall, the premise of the paper is good, if mud content may be used as a proxy for Corg sediment contents of seagrass ecosystems and adjacent bare sediments. However I have one major concern: Instead of carbon content, have the authors compared the mud fraction carbon density (g cm-3) instead of carbon content? The reason I say this is that while carbon content may decrease downcore, sediment density often increases downcore. As such, carbon density may be fairly constant downcore (for instance see Donato et al. (2011)). Furthermore, sediment density is directly related to grainsize and showing the carbon densities should reduce the effect of soil depth and aging. The authors should have the dry bulk density since they have the dry weights and volume for each interval. Therefore, I would suggest that the mud fraction would have a greater relation to carbon density. Moreover, carbon density is a better link to blue carbon (carbon accumulation) than carbon content.

Another objective of this work is reduce costs in blue carbon research. Have the authors compared the cost in analyzing carbon content as compared to grainsize analyses? I would suggest that it is easier and cheaper measure of carbon content (and carbon density) than grain size analyses (sand, silt and clay fractions).

Minor comment; the authors explain that mud content is composed of silt and clay too many time throughout the text. This only needs to be stated once in the abstract and once in the main text.

Donato, D.C., Kauffman, J.B., Murdiyarso, D., Kurnianto, S., Stidham, M., Kanninen, M., 2011. Mangroves among the most carbon-rich forests in the tropics. Nature Geoscience 4, 293-297.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (Editor review) (12 Jul 2016) by Gwenaël Abril

AR by O. Serrano on behalf of the Authors (05 Aug 2016) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (10 Aug 2016) by Gwenaël Abril

AR by O. Serrano on behalf of the Authors (14 Aug 2016)

Short summary

We explored the relationship between organic carbon and mud (i.e. silt and clay) contents in seagrass ecosystems to address whether mud can be used to predict soil C content, thereby enabling robust scaling up exercises at a low cost as part of blue carbon stock assessments. We show that mud is not a universal proxy for blue carbon content in seagrass ecosystems, but it can be used to estimate soil Corg content when low biomass seagrass species (i.e. Zostera, Halodule and Halophila) are present.