Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 4.1
Carbon storage totals for global soils
Storage (Gt C)
Reservoir type
Author(s)
1,115 Gt
Soils, present potential (
'
prehistoric
'
)
Adams et al. (
1990
)
1,395 Gt (1.)
Peats + soils, present potential
Adams et al. (
1990
)
1,405 Gt (3.)
Soils, present day
Bazilevich (
1974
) (s.)
3,000 Gt (4.)
Soils (+peats?), present day
Bohn (
1978
) (s.)
1,672 Gt (3.)
Soils, present day
Bolin et al. (
1979
) (s.)
1,477 Gt (5.)
Soils, present day
Buringh (
1983
) (s.)
1,515 Gt (6.)
Soils (+peat lands?) present day
Schlesinger (
1984
)
787 Gt
Forest soils only (+
ne debris)
Dixon and Krankina (
1993
)
1,500 Gt (7.)
Soils, in 1989
IPCC (
1990
) (s.)
1,560 Gt (7.)
Soils, in
'
pre-industrial
'
era
IPCC (
1990
) (s.)
860 Gt (8.)
Peats, present day
Bohn (
1976
) (s.)
300 Gt (8.)
Peats
Sjors (
1980
) (s.)
202 Gt (8.)
Peats
Post et al. (
1982
)
377 Gt (8.)
Peats
Bohn (
1976
,
1982a
,
b
)
180
227 Gt (8.)
Peats
Gorham (
1990
) (s.)
-
461 Gt (9.)
Subarctic and boreal peat
Gorham and Janssens (
1992
)
1,576 Gt (10.)
Global soils (present day)
Eswaran et al. (
1993
)
500 Gt (11.)
Global peats
Markov et al. (
1988
) (s.)
Table 4.2
Previous global carbon storage estimates for vegetation
Storage (Gt C)
Reservoir type
Author(s)
827 Gt (1.)
Present actual land vegetation
Whittaker and Likens (
1975
) (s.)
560 Gt (2.)
Present actual land vegetation
Olson et al. (
1983
)
550 Gt (3.)
Present actual (1980s) land vegetation
IPCC (
1990
) (s.)
610 Gt (3.)
Pre-industrial (pre-1700) vegetation
IPCC (
1990
) (s.)
1,080 Gt (4)
Land vegetation,
'
prehistoric
'
times
Bazilevich et al. (
1971
)
924 Gt
Present potential (
'
prehistoric
'
) vegetation
Adams et al. (
1990
)
343 Gt (5.)
Last glacial maximum vegetation
Adams et al. (
1990
)
350 Gt
Coarse woody debris (present potential)
Harmon et al. (pers. Comm.,
1990
)
591 Gt (8.)
Present actual land vegetation
Ajtay et al. (
1979
) (s.)
coastal mangrove forests store more carbon than
almost any other forest on Earth. Their
Mangrove sediment carbon stores were on
average
ndings are
published online in the journal Nature Geoscience,
The mangrove forest
ve times larger than those typically
observed in temperate, boreal and tropical terres-
trial forests, on a per-unit-area basis. The man-
grove forest
'
'
s ability to store such
large amounts of carbon can be attributed, in
part, to the deep organic-rich soils in which it
thrives (Fig.
4.1
).
The soil depth mostly increases with time as the
silt of the overlying aquatic phase deposit on the
existing soil bed (intertidal mud
s complex root systems, which
anchor the plants into underwater sediment, slow
down incoming tidal waters allowing organic and
inorganic material to settle into the sediment sur-
face. Low oxygen conditions slow decay rates,
resulting in much of the carbon accumulating in
the soil. In fact, mangroves have more carbon in
their soil alone than most tropical forests have in
all their biomass and soil combined.
fl
ats). This happens
because the intertidal mud
ats suffer total sub-
mergence by silty water during high tide (Fig.
4.2
).
fl
