For wetland plants, rising sea levels offset benefits from higher carbon dioxide levels
photo: Derek Jensen/Wikimedia Commons
The following is an excerpt from a news report from Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health.
Wetlands around the world are at risk of drowning due to rising sea levels. But for decades, scientists have hoped that another aspect of climate change — rising carbon dioxide (CO2) — could trigger additional plant growth that would allow coastal wetlands to grow fast enough to outpace sea level rise.That useful side effects are disappearing, they find in a new study in the journal scientific progress.
“In some ways, it’s a race,” says co-authors Lou Ziska, Professor of Environmental Health Sciences, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, Plant Physiologist. “The race between what carbon dioxide can do and what sea level can do.”
Ziska, who began his postdoc in the second year of this research, has over the course of his life witnessed a shift in perceptions of climate change, from climate change as an issue for our grandkids, to a current concern. “[S]Rising levels of EA threaten one of the world’s largest carbon sinks, swamps and wetlands – another aspect of how widespread and pervasive climate change is affecting the world around us,” he said.
“Too much water is a stress, an environmental stress, for the plant’s response to high carbon dioxide,” said lead author Chunwu Zhu. Zhu, a biologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, conducted the research while working as a researcher at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.
The study was conducted at the Smithsonian Global Change Research Wetlands on Maryland’s west coast. The wetlands are home to several futuristic experiments where scientists simulated the climate in 2100. For the study, the researchers relied on an experiment that began in 1987 — currently the world’s longest-running field experiment on how rising carbon dioxide affects plants. In 15 open-roofed chambers, scientists have been raising carbon dioxide concentrations by 340 ppm, about double the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration in 1987.
Read the full text on Mailman School’s website.
