Reviews and syntheses: Hidden forests, the role of vegetated coastal habitats in the ocean carbon budget

Abstract. Vegetated coastal habitats, including seagrass and macroalgal beds, mangrove forests and salt-marshes, form highly productive ecosystems, but their contribution to the global carbon budget remains overlooked and these forests remain “hidden” in representations of the global carbon budget. Despite being confined to a narrow belt around the shoreline of the world’s oceans, where they cover less than 7 million km2, vegetated coastal habitats support about 10 % of the global marine net primary production, and generate a large organic carbon surplus, of about 40 % of their NPP, which is either buried in sediments within these habitats or exported away. Large, 10-fold uncertainties in the area covered by vegetated coastal habitats, along with variability about carbon flux estimates, result in a 10-fold bracket around the estimates of their contribution to organic carbon sequestration in sediments and the deep sea from 73 Tg C year−1 to 866 Tg C year−1 , representing up to 1/3 of the biological CO2 removal by marine biota. Up to 1/2 of this carbon sequestration occurs in sink reservoirs (sediments or the deep sea) beyond these habitats. The organic carbon exported that does not reach depositional sites subsidizes the metabolism of heterotrophic organisms. In addition to their significant contribution to organic carbon production and sequestration, vegetated coastal habitats contribute as much to carbonate accumulation as coral reefs do. Whereas globally-relevant, the magnitude of global carbon fluxes supported by salt-marsh, mangrove, seagrass and macroalgal habitats is declining due to rapid habitat loss, contributing to loss of CO2 sequestration, storage capacity and carbon subsidies. Incorporating the carbon fluxes vegetated coastal habitats support into depictions of the carbon budget of the global ocean and its perturbations will improve current representations of the carbon budget of the global ocean.