Zach Zildjian

Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Natural Sciences

First Advisor

Oberle, Brad

Area of Concentration

Environmental Studies

Abstract

Soil carbon could be considered one of the most important resources that no one really talks about. Not only is this huge pool of carbon directly related to the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, but it is also vital for agricultural productivity as well as soil health and function in general. The flux of carbon in and out of the soil has always been large, but recently human land use changes have caused more carbon to be released from the soil than is replaced. Planting trees is seen as one of the ways to mitigate this issue because of their role in carbon sequestration, however most of the strategies focus on landscape scale approaches in rural areas and there is less information on how well trees are sequestering carbon in urbanized areas where soil carbon is typically depleted the most. I chose to investigate if individual trees in an urban area positively influence soil carbon. To do this I took soil samples to analyze fine scale variation in soil organic carbon around two different species of tree in Sarasota (Mango and Gumbo Limbo) and determine if: (1) There is more carbon closer to the tree, (2) Bigger trees have more carbon, and (3) If the relationships between these variables is the same for both species. My results generally showed a positive relationship between distance from the tree and organic carbon, which could imply trees are negatively influencing soil carbon. This is probably not the case though, considering I found a positive relationship between organic carbon and tree size, which indicates that bigger trees store more carbon. There were apparent but inconsistent differences in the patterns seen for each species when accounting for species type in the models, which means that these two species probably influence soil carbon in different ways. Because of the small sample size and the limited scope of this project, these conclusions apply only to the individuals I sampled. They are only generalizable to other trees under the assumption that the conditions where the trees were growing, and any other outside factors that could influence soil carbon, were consistent enough between each site to have a negligible effect on my results. The amount of variation I observed between trees compared to the variation within each tree, indicates that many more trees should be sampled to draw specific conclusions.

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