Blue carbon & restoration
Coastal sediments hold carbon more stably than forests because oxygen never arrives; restoration is hydrology first, carbon later.
The cluster starts with chemistry: in anoxic sediments the fast carbon cycle stops, and sulfate reduction suppresses methanogenesis, so coastal mud holds carbon orders of magnitude longer than a forest floor. Hence the first motif: permanence is a race of rates — sediment accretion against sea-level rise.
The second motif is the sequence of restoration work: the hydrological operation first (tidal exchange, elevation in the tidal frame), the biology second; carbon accounting arrives last and trails the ecology by years. Corals carry a limit restoration cannot move: time-to-reproductive-maturity against the interval between heat waves — projects only buy time.
These pages deliberately do not re-derive the ecology that lives in the neighbouring restoration cluster: here the carbon chemistry and the accounting, there the survival and the succession.
Start with blue carbon: anoxic burial and its arithmetic are set out there.
Articles 3
| Blue carbon Coastal wetlands bury carbon thousands of years deep in the accounting sense: anoxia slows decomposition, sulfate chemistry suppresses methane, and rising sediment carries the carbon out of oxygen's reach for centuries. |
| Blue-carbon habitat restoration Coastal habitat restoration is hydrological surgery first and planting second: the tidal elevation, wave climate and light climate decide survival, and the carbon begins to arrive only after the ecology does. |
| Coral reef restoration A coral is an animal farming algae inside its own tissue; bleaching is the breakdown of that partnership under heat, and every restoration technique is an attempt to rebuild the partnership faster than warming destroys it. |