Interactive Effects of Salinity, Redox State, Soil Type, and Colloidal
Size Fractionation on Greenhouse Gas Production in Coastal Wetland Soils
Abstract
This study examines how greenhouse gas (GHG) production and organic
matter (OM) transformations in coastal wetland soils vary with the
availability of oxygen and other terminal electron acceptors. We also
evaluated how OM and redox-sensitive species varied across different
size fractions: particulates (0.45-1μm), fine colloids (0.1-0.45μm), and
nano particulates plus truly soluble (<0.1μm; NP+S) during
21-day aerobic and anaerobic slurry incubations. Soils were collected
from the center of a freshwater coastal wetland (FW-C) in Lake Erie, the
upland-wetland edge of the same wetland (FW-E), and the center of a
saline coastal wetland (SW-C) in Washington state. Anaerobic methane
production for FW-E soils were 47 and 27,537 times greater than FW-C and
SW-C soils, respectively. High particulate Fe2+ and dissolved sulfate
concentrations in FW-C and SW-C soils suggest that iron and/or sulfate
reduction inhibited methanogenesis. Aerobic CO2 production was highest
for both freshwater soils, which had a higher proportion of OM in the
NP+S fraction (64±28% and 70±10% for FW-C and FW-E, respectively) and
C:N ratios reflective of microbial detritus (1.7±0.2 and 1.4±0.3 for
FW-E and FW-C, respectively) compared to SW-C, which had a higher
fraction of particulate (58±9%) and fine colloidal (19±7%) OM and C:N
ratios reflective of vegetation detritus (11.2 ± 0.5). The variability
in GHG production and shifts in OM size fractionation and composition
observed across freshwater and saline soils collected within individual
and across different sites reinforce the high spatial variability in the
processes controlling OM stability, mobility, and bioavailability in
coastal wetland soils.