Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2023 Apr 25:14:1048609.
doi: 10.3389/fpls.2023.1048609. eCollection 2023.

Mountain wetland soil carbon stocks of Huascarán National Park, Peru

Rodney A Chimner  1 , Sigrid C Resh  1 , John A Hribljan  2 , Michael Battaglia  3 , Laura Bourgeau-Chavez  3 , Gillian Bowser  4 , Erik A Lilleskov  5
Affiliations

Mountain wetland soil carbon stocks of Huascarán National Park, Peru

Rodney A Chimner et al. Front Plant Sci. .

Abstract

Although wetlands contain a disproportionately high amount of earth's total soil carbon, many regions are still poorly mapped and with unquantified carbon stocks. The tropical Andes contain a high concentration of wetlands consisting mostly of wet meadows and peatlands, yet their total organic carbon stocks are poorly quantified, as well as the carbon fraction that wet meadows store compared to peatlands. Therefore, our goal was to quantify how soil carbon stocks vary between wet meadows and peatlands for a previously mapped Andean region, Huascarán National Park, Peru. Our secondary goal was to test a rapid peat sampling protocol to facilitate field sampling in remote areas. We sampled soil to calculate carbon stocks of four wetland types: cushion peat, graminoid peat, cushion wet meadow, and graminoid wet meadow. Soil sampling was conducted by using a stratified randomized sampling scheme. Wet meadows were sampled to the mineral boundary using a gouge auger, and we used a combination of full peat cores and a rapid peat sampling procedure to estimate peat carbon stocks. In the lab, soils were processed for bulk density and carbon content, and total carbon stock of each core was calculated. We sampled 63 wet meadows and 42 peatlands. On a per hectare basis, carbon stocks varied strongly between peatlands (avg. 1092 MgC ha-1) and wet meadows (avg. 30 MgC ha-1). Overall, wetlands in Huascarán National Park contain 24.4 Tg of carbon with peatlands storing 97% of the total wetland carbon and wet meadows accounting for 3% of the wetland carbon in the park. In addition, our results show that rapid peat sampling can be an effective method for sampling carbon stocks in peatlands. These data are important for countries developing land use and climate change policies as well as providing a rapid assessment method for wetland carbon stock monitoring programs.

Keywords: bofedales; peatlands; puna; tropics; wet meadows.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The reviewer DC declared a shared affiliation with the author(s) GB to the handling editor at the time of review.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Location map Huascarán National Park, Peru showing sampling locations.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Image showing the difference in soil carbon between wet meadows (left) and peatlands (right).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Correlation between full peat cores from across the Andes (black circles: Hribljan et al., 2023), full cores from this study (red circles), and probe values from this study (yellow circles).
Figure 4
Figure 4
Correlation between peatland carbon stocks (Black circles: Peatland C-Stock=1.16(elevation)-3736.3, R2 = 0.19, P<0.004) and wet meadows (Red circles: Wet meadow C-Stock=0.018(elevation)-39.3, R2 = 0.02, P<0.22) and elevation. Note the difference in scale between the peat samples (left y axis) and the wet meadow samples (right y axis).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Beucher A., Koganti T., Iversen B. V., Greve M. H. (2020). Mapping of peat thickness using a multi-receiver electromagnetic induction instrument. Remote Sens. 12, 1–21. doi: 10.3390/rs12152458 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Billings W. D., Mooney H. A. (1968). The ecology of arctic and alpine plants. Biol. Rev. 43, 481–529. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-185X.1968.tb00968.x - DOI
    1. Boaga J., Viezzoli A., Cassiani G., Deidda G. P., Tosi L., Silvestri S. (2020). Resolving the thickness of peat deposits with contact-less electromagnetic methods: a case study in the Venice coastland. Sci. Total Environ. 737, 139361. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.139361 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Bourgeau-Chavez L. L., Grelik S. L., Battaglia M. J., Leisman D. J., Chimner R. A., Hribljan J. A., et al. . (2021). Advances in Amazonian peatland discrimination with multi-temporal PALSAR refines estimates of peatland distribution, c stocks and deforestation. Front. Earth Sci. 9. doi: 10.3389/feart.2021.676748 - DOI
    1. Brus D. J., Kempen B., Heuvelink G. B. (2011). Sampling for validation of digital soil maps. Eur. J. Soil Sci. 2 (3), 394–407. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2389.2011.01364.x - DOI