You might see birds and fish, but you probably don't think about carbon. Florida has 76,000 ponds that store plenty of carbon, and a lot of it escapes into the atmosphere.
The University of Florida found that ponds lose more carbon via gas than they store in muck.
Mary Lusk is an assistant professor of soil and water sciences at the University of Florida.
The research will help scientists estimate how much carbon is entering the atmosphere from these ponds on a regional basis.
She hopes that once people understand that better, they will take the ponds into account for policies related to carbon control. They are under studied in terms of how they are impacting the local environment. Because they are human-made parts of the landscape, people assume they are not very important.
The number of ponds made Lusk wonder if they could have larger environmental effects than people think. One of her graduate students wanted to study carbon, but she wanted to focus on nitrogen and phosphorus in ponds.
When I learned that I had the chance to work in the same ponds that I had grown up in, I immediately wondered what about the little urban ponds. Goeckner asked how they compare to other aquatic environments.
When you consider how many of them exist in developed landscapes and how many continue to be built, it adds up to a lot.
Goeckner designed a way to measure the amount of carbon leaving ponds for the study. Goeckner's findings hold implications for pond carbon emissions around the world.
Goeckner took the canoes into the ponds. She and the lab technician were in a canoe. Goeckner collected muck from the bottom of the ponds and measured the depth of the muck above the sand to see when the pond was constructed and the amount of organic carbon stored in it.
The amount of carbon buried in the ponds was found by Goeckner.
She modified a chamber that is normally used to measure greenhouse gases. Goeckner used the chamber to measure the gases from the ponds.
She found the amount of gases that escape from the ponds each year and compared it to the amount of carbon stored in the muck. Scientists now know that ponds give off more carbon than they store and that the amount lost changes over the lifetime of a pond.
Florida is going to become more urbanized as it continues to grow. New ponds are not as good at storing carbon as older ones.
The amount of carbon stored in ponds may be promoted by their biogeochemical properties. The storage efficiency of carbon entering the water is improved.
When they are new, they emit large proportions of carbon from the landscape and could potentially increase storage over time. If you think about the rate of new housing development in Florida, and how fast new stormwater ponds are being built in all that new development, it means we will always have a fresh new bunch of young ponds that are just pumping carbon out to the atmosphere.
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The University of Florida provides materials. Brad Buck wrote the original. Content can be edited for style and length.
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