When You’re a Wet(land), You’re A Wet(land) All the Way – GWC Mag

Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.

Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences

Wetlands, whether a swamp, a marsh, a bog, or a fen, generate a rich imagination in human art and culture. They are alternatingly maligned, spooky, and dark, impeding progress and blocking passage, in need of draining, or beloved, as special places, biodiverse, and rich in “ecosystem services” like water filtration and worthy of protection.

To scientists, wetlands also have a special hold as the mélange of hydrological, biological, and geophysical interactions can be highly complex, bespoke, and unique among terrestrial ecosystems. This leads to a range of biogeochemical and biophysical interactions that are challenging to incorporate into Earth system models, one being the high and variable rates of methane emissions common within the anoxic conditions found in wetlands. These methane emissions are a major part of the global methane budget and responsible for dramatic swings in methane’s atmospheric growth rate over the past decades.

As part of JGR: Biogeosciences’ 20^th anniversary collection, Forbrich et al. [2024] survey the past three decades of advances in Earth system modeling for wetland methane emissions. The authors highlight several advances in representing wetland morphology, processes, and the role of in situ and remotely sensed observations in improving our model predictions. Many of these advances were published in JGR: Biogeosciences and other AGU journals, and the manuscript provides an excellent introduction to the rich literature on this “wet” topic!

Citation: Forbrich, I., Yazbeck, T., Sulman, B., Morin, T. H., Tang, A. C. I., & Bohrer, G. (2024). Three decades of wetland methane surface flux modeling by earth system models-advances, applications, and challenges. Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, 129, e2023JG007915. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023JG007915

—Ankur R. Desai, Associate Editor, JGR: Biogeosciences

Text © 2024. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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