High spatiotemporal variability of methane concentrations challenges estimates of emissions across vegetated coastal ecosystems

Abstract

Coastal methane (CH₄ ) emissions dominate the global ocean CH₄ budget and can offset the "blue carbon" storage capacity of vegetated coastal ecosystems. However, current estimates lack systematic, high-resolution, and long-term data from these intrinsically heterogeneous environments, making coastal budgets sensitive to statistical assumptions and uncertainties. Using continuous CH₄ concentrations, δ¹³ C-CH₄ values, and CH₄ sea-air fluxes across four seasons in three globally pervasive coastal habitats, we show that the CH₄ distribution is spatially patchy over meter-scales and highly variable in time. Areas with mixed vegetation, macroalgae, and their surrounding sediments exhibited a spatiotemporal variability of surface water CH₄ concentrations ranging two orders of magnitude (i.e., 6-460 nM CH₄ ) with habitat-specific seasonal and diurnal patterns. We observed (1) δ¹³ C-CH₄ signatures that revealed habitat-specific CH₄ production and consumption pathways, (2) daily peak concentration events that could change >100% within hours across all habitats, and (3) a high thermal sensitivity of the CH₄ distribution signified by apparent activation energies of ~1 eV that drove seasonal changes. Bootstrapping simulations show that scaling the CH₄ distribution from few samples involves large errors, and that ~50 concentration samples per day are needed to resolve the scale and drivers of the natural variability and improve the certainty of flux calculations by up to 70%. Finally, we identify northern temperate coastal habitats with mixed vegetation and macroalgae as understudied but seasonally relevant atmospheric CH₄ sources (i.e., releasing ≥ 100 μmol CH₄ m^-2 day^-1 in summer). Due to the large spatial and temporal heterogeneity of coastal environments, high-resolution measurements will improve the reliability of CH₄ estimates and confine the habitat-specific contribution to regional and global CH₄ budgets.