Climate Change Impacts on Salt Marsh Blue Carbon, Nitrogen and Phosphorous Stocks and Ecosystem Services

Abstract

Salt marshes are valuable ecosystems, as they provide food, shelter, and important nursery areas for fish and macroinvertebrates, and a wide variety of ecosystem services for human populations. These ecosystem services heavily rely on the floristic composition of the salt marshes with different species conferring different service values and different adaptation and resilience capacities towards ecosystem stressors. Blue carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous stocks are no exception to this, and rely on the interspecific differences in the primary production metabolism and physiological traits. Furthermore, these intrinsic physiological characteristics also modulate the species response to any environmental stressor, such as the ones derived from ongoing global changes. This will heavily shape transitional ecosystem services, with significant changes of the ecosystem value of the salt marshes in terms of cultural, provisioning, regulating, and supporting ecosystem services, with a special emphasis on the possible alterations of the blue carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous stocks retained in these key environments. Thus, the need to integrate plant physiological characteristics and feedbacks towards the expected climate change-driven stressors becomes evident to accurately estimate the ecosystem services of the salt marsh community, and transfer these fundamental services into economic assets, for a fluid communication of the ecosystems value to stakeholders, decision and policy makers, and environmental management entities.