Blue carbon storage in a tropical coastal estuary: Insights for conservation priorities.

Seagrass ecosystems have been determined as necessary sinks in the global carbon cycle and contribute towards climate change mitigations. In the recent past, there has been an increase of studies focused on blue carbon opportunities provided by seagrasses but large knowledge gaps and uncertainties remain, particularly in tropical seagrass meadows in the South Asian regions. Therefore, the current study aims to quantify the organic carbon stocks in the seagrass meadows on the tropical estuary in southern coast of Sri Lanka and highlights the need of conserving seagrasses specially in the context of effective management of lagoons to achieve Sustainable Development Goals. Landsat 9 (OLI/TIRS) images were used to develop seagrass distribution maps for 2022 and the data were verified with ground truthing. Vegetation and soil samples were taken from eight sampling locations representing the Rekawa Lagoon. Aboveground biomass (AGB) and belowground biomass (BGB) were determined by multiplying the biomass with the carbon conversion factor whereas the loss-on-ignition (LOI) technique was applied to calculate the soil organic carbon. Results revealed that the soil core carbon content of the study site were ranged between 2.56 ± 0.29 to 3.04 ± 0.44 Mg C/ha. The calculated total carbon content of the 0.0324 km

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Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.