A cost-effective method for reducing soil disturbance-induced errors in static chamber measurement of wetland methane emissions
Abstract
© 2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. Static chambers used for sampling
methane (CH 4 ) in wetlands are highly sensitive to soil disturbance. Temporary compression
around chambers during sampling can inflate the initial chamber CH 4 headspace concentration
and/or lead to generation of non-linear, unreliable flux estimates that must be discarded.
In this study, we tested an often-used rubber gasket (RG)-sealed static chamber against
a water-filled gutter (WFG) seal design that could be set up and sampled from a distance
of 2 m with a newly designed remote rod sampling system to reduce soil disturbance.
Compared to conventional RG design, our remotely sampled static chambers reduced the
chance of detecting inflated initial CH 4 concentrations ( > 3.6 ppm) from 66 to 6 %
and nearly doubled the proportion of robust linear regressions (r 2 > 0.9) from
45 to 86 %. Importantly, the remote rod sampling system allows for more accurate and
reliable CH 4 sampling without costly boardwalk construction. This paper presents
results demonstrating that the remote rod sampling system combined with WFG static
chambers improves CH 4 data reliability by reducing initial gas measurement variability
due to chamber disturbance when tested on a mineral soil-restored wetland in Charles
City County, Virginia, USA.
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/15702Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1007/s11273-015-9468-5Publication Info
Winton, RS; & Richardson, CJ (2016). A cost-effective method for reducing soil disturbance-induced errors in static chamber
measurement of wetland methane emissions. Wetlands Ecology and Management, 24(4). pp. 419-425. 10.1007/s11273-015-9468-5. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/15702.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Curtis J. Richardson
Research Professor of Resource Ecology in the Division of Environmental Science and
Policy
Curtis J. Richardson is Professor of Resource Ecology and founding Director of the
Duke University Wetland Center in the Nicholas School of the Environment. Dr. Richardson
earned his degrees from the State University of New York and the University of Tennessee.
His research interests in applied ecology focus on long-term ecosystem response to
large-scale perturbations such as climate change, toxic materials, trace metals, flooding,
or nutrient additions. He has specific interests in phosphor

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