Nature – Filbee-Dexter et al. (2024): Carbon export from seaweed forests to deep ocean sinks
Karen Filbee-Dexter, Albert Pessarrodona, Morten F. Pedersen, Thomas Wernberg, Carlos M. Duarte, Jorge Assis, Trine Bekkby, Michael T. Burrows, Daniel F. Carlson, Jean-Pierre Gattuso, Hege Gundersen, Kasper Hancke, Kira A. Krumhansl, Tomohiro Kuwae, Jack J. Middelburg, Pippa J. Moore, Ana M. Queirós, Dan A. Smale, Isabel Sousa-Pinto, Nobuhiro Suzuki, Dorte Krause-Jensen IN: Nature Geoscience, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01449-7
The coastal ocean represents an important global carbon sink and is a focus for interventions to mitigate climate change and meet the Paris Agreement targets while supporting biodiversity and other ecosystem functions. However, the fate of the flux of carbon exported from seaweed forests—the world’s largest coastal vegetated ecosystem—is a key unknown in marine carbon budgets. Here we provide national and global estimates for seaweed-derived particulate carbon export below 200 m depth, which totalled 3–4% of the ocean carbon sink capacity.