Blue Carbon 2019: Sources, rates and fate of carbon in the marine environment was a one-day event at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland on Friday 28 June. ABRU-MERG researcher Tom Jilbert gave an invited presentation summarizing the recent work of the group into carbon cycling in coastal sediments of the Baltic Sea. The presentation included results from the Baltic Bridge collaboration with Stockholm University, as well as from Karoliina Koho's and Tom's own Academy of Finland- funded research.
Blue carbon primarily refers to carbon that is stored in vegetated coastal systems such as seagrasses, mangroves and salt marshes, and hence prevented from escaping to the atmosphere as CO2. One of the themes of this meeting, however, was that other important coastal marine carbon reservoirs, including macroalgal detritus and muddy sediments, should also be considered when estimating total blue carbon stocks. The meeting included a keynote from Thomas Bianchi from University of Florida, USA, and many representatives of the blue carbon community in Scotland and the UK.