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Spatial variations in methane emissions from natural wetlands in China

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Abstract

Natural wetlands are thought to be one of the largest natural sources of atmospheric methane concentrations. Although numerous studies referred to the rate of methane fluxes in different geophysical regions, only a few had estimates of the overall geographical methane emissions in China. This study estimated the spatial variations of annual methane emissions with the pixel size of 1 km × 1 km from natural wetlands, excluding water surface, in China. The natural wetland areas were extracted from the database of the 2000 land covers, and geophysical divisions were used to represent different climate conditions. Methane emission in every geophysical region was calculated based on methane release factors obtained from an extensive overview of published literature and the data of elevation and vegetation proportion. The estimated annual methane emissions ranged from 0 to 5,702.8 kg per pixel within the area of 1 km2, and the spatial variation in methane emissions was strongly correlated with proportion of wetlands in the area. The total methane emission from natural wetland in China ranged from 3.48 to 7.16 Tg (terrogram, unit of weight) per year, with the mean value of 4.94 Tg per year, based on the area 133,000 km2 of natural wetlands. Specifically, the wetland in Northeast China had the highest contribution in China (39 %). Inner Mongolia and Qinghai-Tibet highland represented for about 25 and 21 %, respectively. The other 15 % of the measured methane was released in Northwest, North, Central, and South China.

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Acknowledgments

Funding support was from the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (20100091120017), National Natural Science Foundation of China (41101315 and 41171324), funding of visiting scholar project by CSC (201208320130), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, and the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. International Institute for Earth System Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093, China

    X. Zhang & H. Jiang

  2. State Key Laboratory of Subtropical Forest Science and Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Carbon Cycling in Forest Ecosystems and Carbon Sequestration, Zhejiang Agriculture and Forestry University, Hangzhou, 311300, China

    H. Jiang

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  1. X. Zhang
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  2. H. Jiang
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Correspondence to X. Zhang.

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Zhang, X., Jiang, H. Spatial variations in methane emissions from natural wetlands in China. Int. J. Environ. Sci. Technol. 11, 77–86 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13762-013-0385-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13762-013-0385-y

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