Organic matter-rich coastal wetlands on installations serve as critical natural buffers—protecting against storm surge and bolstering installation resilience. Yet current organic matter pools and flows estimates are too variable for confident land-use decisions. The overall objective of this project is to develop transferable and scalable carbon budget templates – carbon is a major constituent of natural systems, accounting for roughly 50% of plant and soil organic matter dry mass – for coastal wetland typologies on Department of Defense (DoD) installations. Quantifying carbon pools and movement among ecosystems components (plant, soil, water, and atmosphere exchange) is a direct way to predict natural systems’ structural integrity and complexity, which determines its natural defense capacity and resilience. For example, soil organic carbon degradation leads to elevation loss beyond thresholds wetland plants can withstand, causing the system to shift from subaerial land to open water bodies with direct consequences to several of DoD’s critical infrastructure and operations. This research includes determining how increased tidal flooding and salinization will affect carbon pools and fluxes at coastal environmental setting types (e.g., minerogenic versus biogenic) where DoD’s coastal wetlands are found both in the Continental United States (CONUS) and Outside the Continental United States (OCONUS).

There are five major tasks to accomplish the objective of this project:

1. Quantify net export of wetland organic and inorganic carbon from DoD installations to coastal waters using empirically delineated tidal creek watershed domains.
2. Determine wetland organic carbon stocks, sedimentation rates, and carbon burial rates at DoD sites.
3. Assess wetland trace gas fluxes from soils and vegetation within DoD installations.
4. Refine and test a novel mass balance approach for estimating lateral wetland carbon fluxes using the datasets generated by this research.
5. Build a web-based tool to display carbon budget templates for DoD coastal wetland types (e.g., tidal swamp forests, coastal marshes).

Building these carbon budgets are essential to understand natural systems’ structural and functional gains or losses in response to shifts in environmental conditions, which ultimately reflect coastal wetlands’ natural defense capacity and resilience. These tasks will generate novel, field-based quantitative databases and models on coastal wetlands' organic matter fluxes and stocks, which in conjunction with published estimates will allow for the determination of coastal wetlands stability across CONUS and OCONUS DoD coastal installations. The framework also includes testing and refining a reduced uncertainty mass balance model that could save millions of dollars in on-the ground estimation of carbon lateral fluxes for data-absent DoD coastal wetlands.

There is currently a significant gap in carbon flux observations—both vertical and lateral—collected from or near DoD coastal installations, with less than 10% of existing data located within 100 km of these sites. Due to the high spatial variability of carbon fluxes, applying generalized or proxy values introduces substantial uncertainty for installation-level planning and asset management. This project aims to modernize data infrastructure by developing robust, location-specific carbon flux and stock estimation templates tailored to DoD coastal environments. The effort will generate scalable, operationally relevant datasets and establish standardized compendiums to support consistent interpretation and use across the enterprise. By advancing technical capacity and data fidelity, this work strengthens natural infrastructure management, informs long-term readiness planning, and supports innovation across domains where environmental data integration is critical to mission success. (Anticipated Project Completion - 2027)