Abstract
Soil organic carbon (SOC) is an important component of freshwater wetlands that may be used to quantify ecosystem services and prioritize conservation efforts. Measuring SOC directly via elemental analysis is often time and cost-prohibitive. Loss-on-ignition (LOI) is a rapid and low-cost method for determining soil organic matter; however, LOI data must be converted to SOC data using a soil type-specific regression model and no models currently exist for freshwater coastal wetlands. To address this gap, we performed regression analyses that convert percent organic matter measured from LOI to SOC for freshwater coastal wetlands in the southern basin of Lake Michigan. Analyses across 6 Lake Michigan wetlands provide a regression model capable of estimating SOC within ±3.5% uncertainty (r2 = 0.757), a threshold useful for wetland management and large-scale soil surveys. Future research should explore the LOI-SOC relationship at other freshwater coastal wetlands – to investigate whether the correlation values found here are typical of these systems and to refine our regression model using data from disparate freshwater locales.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Jenny Bueno, Cesar Gutierrez, and Danielle M. Nelson for assistance with field and laboratory work. Thanks to Grace Schellinger and Yarrow Axford for allowing us access to laboratory space at Northwestern University and for advising on the laboratory procedures. Thanks to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, the Little Calumet River Basin Development Commission, the City of Gary, Indiana, and the Berrien County Parks Commission for granting site access for this study. The study resulting in this paper was assisted by a grant from the Undergraduate Research Grant Program, administered by Northwestern University’s Office of the Provost as well as internal funding by the Illinois State Geological Survey of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. However, the conclusions, opinions, and other statements in this paper are our own and not necessarily those of the sponsoring institutions.
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Braun, K.N., Theuerkauf, E.J., Hurtgen, M.T. et al. Loss-On-Ignition Estimates for Soil Organic Carbon in Great Lakes Freshwater Coastal Wetlands. Wetlands 40, 1201–1206 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-020-01270-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-020-01270-z