sea4soCiety is a large collaborative project aiming to determine the potential of coastal vegetated ecosystems for carbon sequestration in an ecologically feasible and societally acceptable way. sea4soCiety is one of the projects of the CDRmare Research Mission of the German Marine Research Alliance (DAM) funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

Our project sea4soCiety-DOM focuses on assessing the potential contribution of dissolved organic matter (DOM) to carbon sequestration. Recalcitrant DOM resists rapid microbial degradation for centuries to millennia and its accumulation in coastal ecosystems is controlled by ecosystem properties. Sediment chemistry in seagrass meadows, for example, controls the accumulation of large amounts of otherwise labile carbon in their rhizosphere (Sogin et al., 2022). Our main goal is to determine chemical diversity, origin, and recalcitrance of DOM from four coastal vegetated ecosystems – macroalgae, seagrasses, salt marshes, and mangroves. Diversity and sources of refractory DOM will be assessed by applying molecular methods including FT-ICR-MS to samples collected along the German coasts as well as other locations worldwide. Based on molecular fingerprints of DOM from the different habitats, recalcitrance of selected compounds will be investigated during controlled mesocosm experiments.

People involved:

Dariya Baiko, Michael Seidel, Thorsten Dittmar

Jana Geuer, Manuel Liebeke

Inga Hellige, Jan-Hendrik Hehemann

Theresa Fett, Mirco Wölfelschneider, Martin Zimmer

Clarisse Goesele, Ella Logemann, Peter Müller

Svenja Reents

Habeeb Thanveer Kalapurakkal, Klaus Wallmann

Kai Bischof

Miriam Philippi, Mar Fernandez-Mendez