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Storage of blue carbon in isolated mangrove forests of the Galapagos’ rocky coast

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A Correction to this article was published on 26 August 2019

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Abstract

Threatened globally, mangrove forests provide many ecosystem services, including blue carbon storage. These forests, and the services that they provide, are distributed across spatio-temporally variable coastal landscapes and a range of environmental conditions, though this variability is underappreciated in the blue carbon literature. The Galapagos, Ecuador, presents the opportunity to explore spatial variability in carbon storage. This volcanically active archipelago features rocky shores and arid conditions at low elevations (< 500 mm/year), with patchy forests under far from optimal conditions. At 29 mangrove sites, we cored from the sediment surface down to basement rock, and samples were dried, weighed, and analyzed for their carbon content by GC–MS. Belowground carbon stocks range from < 50 Mg/ha to > 500 Mg/ha, i.e. from practically no carbon to values typical of lush, productive mangroves. This variability is driven principally by variation in sediment depth, with high inter-site variance associated with underlying lava substrate. The first to measure mangrove blue carbon in the Galapagos, this study reveals the spatial heterogeneity of the islands’ patchy mangroves. These results underscore the importance of local ecosystem constraints and natural variability in ecosystem service valuation for conservation prioritization.

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Change history

  • 26 August 2019

    In the original publication, the affiliation of second author and acknowledgements were incorrectly published. The correct affiliation and acknowledgements are given below.

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Acknowledgements

Financial support was provided by the Helmsley Charitable Trust and the International Community Foundation, and graduate fellowship support for M.T.C. by the National Science Foundation. We thank SIO and CDF staff, especially E. Rastoin, for facilitating travel and field logistics; J. J. Cota-Nieto and I. Mascarenas for fieldwork; K. Laface and E. Navarro for lab assistance; and E. Cleland and J. Leichter for providing useful comments on the manuscript. Sediment samples were collected and exported from Ecuador using the Ministerio del Ambiente permit 054-2015 DPNG. The data in this paper are available in the Supplementary Material.

Funding

Financial support was provided by the Helmsley Charitable Trust and the International Community Foundation, and graduate fellowship support for M.T.C. by the National Science Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Aburto-Oropeza Lab, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA, 92093-0206, USA

    Matthew T. Costa & Octavio Aburto-Oropeza

  2. Charles Darwin Research Station, Charles Darwin Foundation, Av. Charles Darwin, Puerto Ayora, Galápagos, Ecuador

    Pelayo Salinas-de-León

Authors
  1. Matthew T. Costa
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  2. Pelayo Salinas-de-León
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  3. Octavio Aburto-Oropeza
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Correspondence to Matthew T. Costa.

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Costa, M.T., Salinas-de-León, P. & Aburto-Oropeza, O. Storage of blue carbon in isolated mangrove forests of the Galapagos’ rocky coast. Wetlands Ecol Manage 27, 455–463 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11273-019-09653-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11273-019-09653-8

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