Source to Sea: Soil carbon transport from forested environments to coastal waters

Scotland is a carbon (C) nation with significant stores held in both terrestrial and marine environments. Scotland's peatlands, for example, hold Europe's largest organic carbon (OC) reserves, and recent research has shown that Scotland's sea lochs are even more effective carbon stores [1,2]. At the land-ocean interface terrestrial and marine C is closely coupled, with sea lochs storing significant amounts of terrestrially derived C [3]. Land use change and management decisions therefore not only impact the terrestrial C cycle but also the coastal C cycle [4], an aspect largely overlooked. Recent work has shown that over Holocene timescales the removal/loss of forests approximately 5000 years ago triggered a substantial change in the quantity of C sequestration in the coastal ocean [5]. We hypothesize that more recent afforestation (last 100 years) had a similar if not greater effect on the coastal ocean because the rate of recent forest cover change exceeds that seen through the Holocene. In this project we will investigate the effect of conifer afforestation on carbon transport to, and accumulation in, the coastal ocean.