Regulators of coastal wetland methane production and responses to simulated global change

Vizza, Carmella; West, William E.; Jones, Stuart E.; Hart, Julia A.; Lamberti, Gary A.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-14-431-2017

Articles | Volume 14, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-14-431-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-14-431-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 14, issue 2

Research article

|

26 Jan 2017

Research article |

| 26 Jan 2017

Regulators of coastal wetland methane production and responses to simulated global change

Carmella Vizza, William E. West, Stuart E. Jones, Julia A. Hart, and Gary A. Lamberti

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Final revised paper (published on 26 Jan 2017)
Preprint (discussion started on 15 Aug 2016)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

SC1: 'Review of bg-2016-314', Mary Scranton, 18 Aug 2016
- AC1: 'Response to Dr. Mary Scranton's review', Carmella Vizza, 25 Aug 2016
  - SC2: 'Reply to author's response to my comments', Mary Scranton, 30 Aug 2016
    - AC2: 'Joint response posted as author comment', Carmella Vizza, 06 Oct 2016
- RC2: 'Review', Mary Scranton, 08 Sep 2016
RC1: 'Interesting study; data analysis and interpretation could be improved', Scott Neubauer, 31 Aug 2016
- AC3: 'Joint response posted as author comment', Carmella Vizza, 06 Oct 2016
AC4: 'Joint response to reviewers', Carmella Vizza, 06 Oct 2016
- AC5: 'revised manuscript', Carmella Vizza, 06 Oct 2016

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (27 Oct 2016) by Gwenaël Abril

AR by Carmella Vizza on behalf of the Authors (27 Oct 2016) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (30 Oct 2016) by Gwenaël Abril

RR by Marcelo Ardon (09 Dec 2016)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I think this is an interesting study. The authors did a good job responding to the two previous reviewers. I have some minor comments regarding parts that could be clarified or worded differently.
Page 1 Line 20 of the abstract- I think the comma should be moved to after the word added.
Page 2 line 10-12- this sentence is too long. Break it up into 2 sentences, and check your comma placements. I don’t think you need a comma after the word fertilization.
Page 2- line 25- I would change the word “signal” to something like “lead to”
Page 3- lines 2-3- I would remove the phrase “which may be influenced by rising global CO2 concentrations and temperatures”. You already spent two paragraph explaining these mechanisms.
Page 4- 16- the brackish tidal wetlands seem to vary more than the freshwater wetlands. It seems like your brackish wetlands span a large salinity gradient, even overlapping the freshwater wetlands. Why combine them?
Page 4 line 28 – “We then we”- please correct
Page 4 lines 28-30- I am confused by the number of samples in your comparisons. You sampled 9 separate locations in the non-tidal freshwater water wetlands and 5 locations in your brackish wetlands. But then you did 5 incubations per location. So is that n=45 for the non-tidal freshwater wetlands, and n=25 for the brackish wetlands? Please clarify.
Page 5- line 15- can you give us a quick summary of the differences in the quality of these species? Is the Tiegs data from the same time you did your experiment?
Page 8 line 29- where the %C, %N, %P, C:N, and C:P measured in this experiment, or are they from the Tiegs et al. 2013 paper?
Page 6 lines 4-5- It is not clear to me how I can assess that ecosystem differences are bigger than temporal differences from Tables 1 and 2. You don’t give any measure of temporal variability for any of the wetlands in the tables. The variation in brackish wetlands could be spatial or temporal. And as I pointed out above, it seems strange to me to combine the brackish wetlands when the ranges are bigger than the non-tidal freshwater wetlands, which you say you kept separate due to spatial differences.
Page 11 lines 5 and 6- what do you mean by “the interaction of global change mechanisms”? Acetate and sulfate availability are not “global change mechanisms”. Please explain.
Page 11 line 16- again I get distracted by how you use the word “signals”. Leads to or indicates? I am not quite sure what you mean in this sentence.
Page 11 line 30- add a comma after organisms.
Page 12 lines 1-2- calcium co-precipitating with P does not necessarily lead to ammonium release. But increased salinity does lead to ammonium release through cation exchange.
Page 13 lines 14-16- Can you provide a citation for these patterns? I don’t think you can infer all these patterns from your 2 time sampling.
Page 13 line 30 130-320 is not two orders of magnitude larger than 5. It is one order of magnitude.
Page 16 line 25- why CO2 fertilization? I would remove that one. Or change it to say increased organic matter to be consistent with your Fig 1. Increased organic matter can be caused from longer growing season, CO2 fertilization, and increased breakdown of soil organic matter.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (Editor review) (11 Dec 2016) by Gwenaël Abril

AR by Carmella Vizza on behalf of the Authors (16 Dec 2016) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (29 Dec 2016) by Gwenaël Abril

AR by Carmella Vizza on behalf of the Authors (06 Jan 2017) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

Global change, specifically sea-level rise and longer growing seasons, have the potential to affect how much methane is emitted from coastal wetlands. Our study found that sea-level rise is likely to reduce methane emissions in the long term, but longer growing seasons could provide more plant matter that fuels and thereby enhances methane production. Future methane emissions from wetlands will be shaped by the quality and quantity of plant matter as well as the microbial communities present.