Cold enough for you? My parents home in the mountains looks like a scene from Dr. Zhivago and it sleeted even in low elevation Martinez yesterday. In the meantime there’s more good news about ponds from our friends at beaverphys.org
Ponds can absorb more carbon than woodland
A carbon sink in your own backyard
Measuring the rate at which ponds can store carbon is tricky, primarily because the age of many ponds is unknown. To get precise measurements of carbon burial rates we exploited an unusual opportunity using some small, lowland pools whose age is known to the exact day. The ponds were dug out in 1994, at Hauxley Nature Reserve in north-east England. Their original purpose was to follow the colonisation of plants and invertebrates.
Two decades later they had accumulated a layer of sediment, dark and rich in organic debris, distinctly different to the underlying clay. We used sediment cores and dug out all of the sediment from some ponds, to measure the organic carbon that had accumulated. The amount of carbon in the cores was
The ponds’ burial rates for organic carbon ranged from 79 to 247g per square metre per year, with a mean of 142g. These rates are high – much higher than the rates of 2-5g attributed to surrounding habitats such as woodland or grassland. Small ponds occupy a tiny proportion of the UK’s land area – scarcely 0.0006% – compared to grassland at 36% or 2.3% for ancient woodland. But the rate of carbon burial we found would result in ponds burying half as much as the vastly greater expanse of grassland.
So all those little ponds do more work burying carbon than all those forests you spend so much time protecting. And if you have a pond actually IN a forest then that saves even more! I’m thinking with those tasty trees nearby I happen to know a flat-tailed helper that can make more of them. The article goes on to say it gets complicated with some ponds like in the tundra releasing more carbon than they trap but still, on the whole, ponds are a very good thing.
These lowland ponds are easy to create, even in a back garden. They can be small and temporary – clean water is the key – and the value of their wildlife is now firmly understood. No longer overlooked, the importance of ponds in the carbon cycle and in fighting climate change is becoming apparent.
Do you remember that I mentioned I was contacted by a beaver fan in Chicago who was planning on her upcoming birthday party to collect donations for Worth A Dam? Well of course we sent a care package and gave her lots of encouragement and many thanks for the noble idea. This morning she wrote that the ‘dam birthday party’ was a blast and she donated 100 dollars she collected that night! Her party looks such a hoot. I’m sure we would have all fit right in. Thank you for helping beavers on your birthday Annette!
