The dataset details greenhouse gas fluxes as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) across six intertidal sites in the winter and summer of 2013. Three of the sites were in Morecambe Bay, North West England and three of the sites were in Essex, South East England, each of these sites consisted of a saltmarsh area and adjacent mudflat area, twenty two sampling quadrats were placed on each area. Light and dark incubations were performed using a benthic chamber on seven of the twenty two quadrats of each site.
This data was collected as part of Coastal Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service Sustainability (CBESS): NE/J015644/1. The project was funded with support from the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service Sustainability (BESS) programme. BESS is a six-year programme (2011-2017) funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) as part of the UK's Living with Environmental Change (LWEC) programme.
Publication date: 2015-12-31
Each site consisted of a polygon of roughly 400 x 500 m to 1000 x 1000 m in size, dependent upon site length (parallel to shore) and width (perpendicular to shore). Twenty two 1 x 1 m quadrats were randomly placed within each site polygon using R (R Development Core Team, 2014) to specify placement at four different spatial scales (A = 1 quadrat only, B = 3 quadrats at 1 m to 10 m apart, C = 6 quadrats at 10 m to 100 m apart, D = 12 quadrats at 100 m to 1000 m or site maximum). Only the quadrat from scale A, two quadrats from scale B and four quadrats from scale C were sampled for greenhouse gas fluxes. Light and dark incubations were performed using a benthic chamber connected to an infrared gas analyser. This allowed direct measurements of CO2. CH4 and N2O fluxes were measured from gas samples collected at five time points during the dark incubation and stored in glass Exetainer bottles for later processing. The samples were analysed using a gas chromatograph.