Read the CCRCN Blue Carbon Inventory Report
The CCRCN collaborated with Pew Charitable Trusts to produce a report on the state of blue carbon data in the contiguous United States. In this first-ever inventory of our database, we assess the quantity, quality, and representativeness of soil core data on a state-by-state basis. Check out the national overview to find out how your state scores on our blue carbon data report card!
Participate in our Methane-Flux Chamber Synthesis
Have chamber-based methane flux data from a coastal wetland, old study, new, or forthcoming? Find out how to participate in a new community paper and synthesis dataset!
Join us for our Annual Town Hall at AGU
Mark your AGU 2019 Calendars for our annual Townhall on Thursday Night at 6:15 pm Moscone West - 2014, L3. Come learn about the network, get progress updates from our working groups and your input on how we use our next three years.
Take our Expert Elicitation Survey
Are you an expert on belowground plant traits and/or decay properties in tidal wetlands? Spend 15 to 30 minutes with our expert elicitation application and give us your best educated guess on several hard to measure traits. The survey is anonymous and will be used to inform our priors for a Bayesian data-model integration study.
Recording of Coastal Carbon Atlas Webinar Available
Missed our recent webinar on the Network and our Coastal Carbon Atlas? Thanks to host Restore America's Estuaries, a recording is available online. Also check out RAE's Blue Carbon webinar series for other upcoming discussions of new policy, research, and tools in the field.
Upcoming Webinar with Restore America's Estuaries
Learn more about the CCRCN and our Coastal Carbon Atlas by registering for the next Blue Carbon in Practice webinar on Wednesday, April 24th at 2:00pm EST, hosted by Restore America's Estuaries. We will discuss the mission of the Network, how to use the Atlas, and how you can get involved. Register for the webinar here.
Feature in SERC Shorelines Blog
The most recent addition of the Smithsonian's coastal newsletter featured a cover story on the CCRCN's data synthesis and modeling efforts related to carbon storage, and provides a clean overview of the importance of carbon (and especially methane) accounting. Check out the full story here.
Introducing the Coastal Carbon Atlas
The CCRCN is pleased to announce the public release of the Coastal Carbon Atlas as a feature of our Data Clearinghouse. Using this web map portal, you can visualize, query, and download directly from the CCRCN database, and provided with raw data is helpful resources and a catered bibliography. Click here to learn more about the CCRCN Data Clearinghouse.
Welcome to New Steering Committee Members, Thanks to Members Emeritus
We would like to welcome Dr. Steve Crooks, Dr. Patty Oikawa, and Dr. Ken Krauss to our Steering Committee, congratulations! We would also like to deeply thank Dr. Lisamarie Windham-Myers and Dr. Kevin Kroeger, who are rotating off of our steering committee, for their vital service in getting the CCRCN funded and for advising us during our first year. Read about the CCRCN administration here.
CCRCN Hosts Successful Inaugural Working Group
On December 8-9 2018, 17 members of the Soil Carbon working group convened at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, integrating biogeochemical, geospatial, botanical, and geomorphological expertise to accelerate modeling and mapping efforts. Learn more about the working group here.
Now Accepting Nominations for our Steering Committee
The CCRCN is seeking nominations for three new members on our steering committee. Committee members contribute towards shaping the goals and timelines of the CCRCN and participate in collaborative research. Review will begin on December 1, 2018. See here for more information.
CCRCN Town Hall at AGU Fall Meeting, December 13 2018
The CCRCN will be hosting another town hall at the American Geophysical Union Fall meeting, December 10-14 2018. The town hall will be held from 18:15-19:15 on Thursday, December 13 in in the Marriott Marquis. Learn more about the town hall here.
Soil Carbon Working Group Up and Running
The CCRCN's inaugural working group began collaborating in July. The group seeks to determine how much variation in carbon stocks and burial rates is attributable to scientific practices versus environmental covariates, and to develop map and model products. Learn more on the Soil Carbon Working Group page.
Learn Data Manipulation with the CCRCN R Coding Tutorials
We have just made available a suite of coding tutorials that utilize RStudio and tidyverse packages to teach data manipulation and visualization skills. These exercises, which are geared towards the introductory R user, enable you to explore the CCRCN Soil Carbon Data Release (version 1), but also will improve data skills related to your own projects.
Check out the coding tutorials here.
Apply for a Working Group
The application portal for the CCRCN working groups is now open. Five working groups, each culminating with an in-person workshop, will take place over the next five years. The steering committee has decided to announce the titles and timing of the first two working groups, as well as suggestions for future working groups. If you are interested in participating in any of the working groups, please fill out an application. The survey will remain open indefinitely, however we will begin considering applicants for our working group 1 on Thursday, July 12th.
Soil Carbon Data Release
The dataset for a NASA CMS-funded and CCRCN-managed publication in Scientific Reports has now been made public via Smithsonian Libraries. Data from 1534 soil cores are available, including per-depth soil organic matter and carbon metrics, plant species identity, state of human impact, field and lab methodology, and core metadata. The paper, led by CCRCN manager James Holmquist, reveals that simple strategies are the most effective for mapping soil carbon, for now.
Public Comment Open on Three Project Principles Documents
In an effort to be responsive to the community, we would like to announce the beginning of a public comment period for 3 key documents: CCRCN Governance, Data Management Principles, and Controlled Vocabulary for our Tidal Soil Carbon Synthesis Products. Public comment will be open for two weeks starting Monday April 2 and ending Friday April 13th.
First Data Release
We officially launch starting January 2018, but we are already hosting our first synthetic dataset on the Smithsonian's GitHub page: a literature review supporting the U.S. Coastal Wetland National Greenhouse Gas Inventory. The page includes summary tables, a report, and an open workflow including SAS code used to create the dataset.
Summary of the CCRCN
Building a Collaborative Network for Coastal Carbon Cycle Synthesis
Tidal marshes, mangrove swamps and seagrass meadows are unique ecosystems found on coastlines worldwide. These wetlands support specialized plant, microbe and animal species that collectively form some of the Earth’s most productive ecosystems, influencing the ecology of estuaries and coastal oceans. Coastal wetlands are also under severe pressure from human activity which threatens to diminish the many benefits they provide to people and aquatic food webs. Among these benefits is the fact that they remove large amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and bury it in soils for centuries to millennia. Indeed, these ecosystems account for nearly 50% of the organic carbon buried in the oceans despite occupying less than 1% of ocean area. This surprising fact suggests an opportunity: that protecting, restoring and managing these ecosystems could help manage greenhouse gas concentrations in addition to the list of other ecological and social benefits they provide. The pace of research on this topic has accelerated and is now too rapid to be synthesized by individual investigators. The goal of this Research Coordination Network is to advance the synthesis of coastal wetland carbon cycle data.
The Coastal Carbon Research Coordination Network will accelerate scientific discovery, advance science-informed policy, and improve coastal ecosystem management by: (1) developing a community dedicated to coastal wetland carbon science for basic research, policy development, and management, (2) exploring the ecological links between coastal wetlands, estuaries, and the atmosphere, and (3) sharing data and analysis tools that support the diverse needs of scientists, policy makers and managers. Activity 1 is a repository for participant-contributed data, and a central portal for downloading data from repositories of interest to the coastal carbon community. Activity 2 is a Coastal Carbon website to attract participation of diverse users by providing a variety of resources that meet their needs. It will provide data analysis tools, a knowledge sharing resource, a video library of training modules in standard methods, a code library to support modeling, links to publications, and a webinar library. Activity 3 is outreach via a series of webinars and 'town hall' gatherings at professional meetings. Activity 4 is a series of workshops on scientific gaps in coastal carbon. Activity 5 is a web-based tool for modeling global warming potentials.
