Fate of methane in canals draining tropical peatlands.

Tropical wetlands and freshwaters are major contributors to the growing atmospheric methane (CH) burden. Extensive peatland drainage has lowered CH emissions from peat soils in Southeast Asia, but the canals draining these peatlands may be hotspots of CH emissions. Alternatively, CH oxidation (consumption) by methanotrophic microorganisms may attenuate emissions.

Strong climate mitigation potential of rewetting oil palm plantations on tropical peatlands.

For decades, tropical peatlands in Indonesia have been deforested and converted to other land uses, mainly oil palm plantations which now cover one-fourth of the degraded peatland area. Given that the capacity for peatland ecosystems to store carbon depends largely on hydrology, there is a growing interest in rewetting degraded peatlands to shift them back to a carbon sink. Recent estimates suggest that peatland rewetting may contribute up to 13 % of Indonesia's total mitigation potential from natural climate solutions.

Quantifying the fluxes of carbon loss from an undrained tropical peatland ecosystem in Indonesia.

Conservation of undrained tropical peatland ecosystems is critical for climate change mitigation as they store a tremendous amount of soil carbon that is preserved under anoxic water-logged conditions. Unfortunately, there are too few measurements of carbon fluxes from these ecosystems to estimate the climate change mitigation potential from such conservation efforts. Here, we measured carbon dioxide (CO) and methane (CH) fluxes as well as fluvial organic carbon export over the peat swamp forest within an undrained tropical peatland landscape in East Kalimantan, Indonesia.

Storage and dynamics of soil organic carbon in allochthonous-dominated and nitrogen-limited natural and planted mangrove forests in southern Thailand.

Mangrove forests can help to mitigate climate change by storing a significant amount of carbon (C) in soils. Planted mangrove forests have been established to combat anthropogenic threats posed by climate change. However, the efficiency of planted forests in terms of soil organic carbon (SOC) storage and dynamics relative to that of natural forests is unclear.