Integrating monthly spring tidal waves into estuarine carbon budget of meta-ecosystems

Rooting Meta-ecosystems with Reciprocal Lateral Carbon and Nitrogen Flows in a Yangtze Coastal Marsh

“…It presents a new perspective for thoroughly exploring the mechanisms that connect nutrient flows at all levels across various spatial scales, thereby upgrading and unifying it into a spatial ecology framework (Marleau et al, 2020). In our previous, we also found that the relatively large amount of suspended silt and sedimentation largely offset the C export by the macrodetritus and led to a near neutral source of lateral flux C budget (Gao et al, 2023). However, the previous study lacked specific information about lateral hydrologic nutrient (i.e., N) flows.…”

“…The climate of the area is characterized by strong seasonal variations, abundant precipitation (606.1~1480.5 mm), and mean monthly temperatures ranging from 2.8~27.5 °C (Huang et al, 2020). The wind direction is typically SSE-SE in the summer, generating a northward longshore current, and NW-NE in the winter, producing a southward longshore current (Gao et al, 2023).…”

“…For this reason, we conducted a topographical survey to measure elevation variations near the towers. Based on this survey, Dongtan was selected as the model ecosystem in this paper for the study of lateral C and N flows (Gao et al, 2023). Therefore, high-temporal-resolution MODIS datasets and field surveys were combined to analyze this rapid lateral exchange process (Wu et al, 2015).…”

“…The precision of the analysis, determined by repeatedly sampling 10% of the samples, yielded a relative error of less than 5%. For a more comprehensive description of the procedures employed, please refer to Gao et al, (2023). The concentration of C and N in each water sample was utilized to calculate C/N ratios, expressed as molar ratios.…”