Coastal wetlands can serve as natural laboratories for assessing the future impacts of sea-level rise and the intricacies of the effect of sulfate (SO42-) on emissions of greenhouse gases, such as methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide. In the case of previously drained and freshened wetlands, we can observe how freshwater terrestrial microbial communities react and adapt to intrusion of SO42- rich saline waters. We conducted a 3-month anoxic incubation experiment with soil extracted from a peatland on the German Baltic coast which was rewetted with brackish water in late 2019 to examine how microbial communities at the site had adapted to the new conditions after two years. Soil slurries were incubated at a moderate temperature of 15 °C at two different salinities (reflecting surface water and average peat soil water salinity) and sampled at 8 timepoints. At each timepoint 5 replicates of each treatment were destructively harvested and sampled for concentrations of CH4, dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC), total aqueous organic carbon, SO42-, ammonium, and other major ions, pH values, qPCR analysis, and δ13DIC and δ13CH4 values.
The data comprise Climber3alpha+C simulations created by Matthias Hofmann (PIK) as part of the Work Package 2.1 of the COMFORT project as well as the PyFerret scripts (written by Ralf Liebermann and Matthias Hofmann) used for their evaluation. The simulation data consist of snap_*.nc files and history.nc files for ocean, atmosphere and mixed layer depth (hmxl) performed for different idealized scenarios: CONTROL, double and fourfold atmospheric CO2 (CO2X2 and CO2X4), also with additional Greenland freshwater influx (CO2X2_HOSING and CO2X4_HOSING). Furthermore, tracer simulations (CONTROL, CO2X4, CO2X4_HOSING) and simulations with constant scavenging (CO2X4) are also included. The aim was to analyse the simulations regarding climate change-induced changes in marine biogeochemistry and primary production, which will be published under the title "Shutdown of Atlantic overturning circulation could cause persistent increase of primary production in the Pacific" (see Related Work).
Simulation data were generated with Climber3alpha+C (Earth system model of intermediate complexity) and evaluated with PyFerret v7.41. CDO was used to aggregate monthly simulation data into annual means.