de Melo Ferreira, Djennyfer Karolaine, authorWrighton, Kelly C., advisorvon Fischer, Joseph, committee memberMelzer, Suellen, committee memberWilkins, Michael, committee member2024-05-272024-05-272024https://hdl.handle.net/10217/238425Zip file contains data spreadsheets.In Chapter 1, I introduce the importance of coastal wetlands for ecosystem services, including carbon storage, physical barrier for natural disasters, and habitat for diverse fauna and flora. Sea level rise is one of the main environmental risks affecting coastal wetlands, because of their geographic position. The effects of saltwater intrusion into freshwater wetlands can change established environmental conditions and vegetation coverage, which affects the functionality of various ecosystem functions they provide. These changes can also affect the methane emissions from coastal wetlands, which are major sources of this potent greenhouse gas. In this chapter, I evaluate the current knowledge of microbial methane production and consumption, including aspects of the ecophysiological adaptation to salinity, and the changes in the microbial ecological interactions modulated by increased salinity from marine water intrusion. In Chapter 2, I conducted a study to characterize the microbial communities and geochemistry of soil and water compartments in three coastal wetlands following a salinity gradient from Barataria Bay, Louisiana. To investigate the methane cycling microbial communities and their distribution on a freshwater flotant, Jean Lafitte swamp, and saltwater marsh wetlands, I collected soil and water samples under different vegetation coverage from each wetland. I analyzed the 16S rRNA gene sequencing and paired this data within situ methane fluxes and porewater concentrations. I also analyzed the geochemistry of the soil samples including profiling the anions, cations, pH, and redox conditions of soil and water samples across wetlands. The analysis showed that the diversity of methane cycling microbial communities decreased with increased salinity. Although the distribution and relative abundance of methanogen functional types was not impacted, with hydrogenotrophic methanogens being the most abundant across all wetlands. Looking at the methanotroph abundance and taxonomy in soil and water samples, I observed that swamp and saltwater wetlands share more methanotroph members in the water column, while the soils had more site-specific similarities. My research findings contribute to the understanding of methane cycling microbial tolerance to saltwater and may be used in future works to create more robust methane prediction models. In Chapter 3, I summarize the key aspects of microbial methane cycling in coastal wetlands and offer future directions for pairing geochemical and microbial data, including using an 'omics' approach and expanding investigation to more wetlands. We discuss the valuable findings these tools can give, contributing to a more accurate prediction of the metabolisms behind the ecophysiology and ecology of methane fluxes in coastal wetlands, and how targeting specific genes and metabolism can better help climate model efforts. In the Appendix sections, I give an expanded characterization of the wetlands site description, hydrology, vegetation and topological heterogeneity. I observed that, although relatively close in geographical position, each wetland has a different salinity range, vegetation type and microtopography that can influence the distribution of microorganisms in the soil and water. Here, we also analyzed the redox potential, dissolved oxygen, pH and geochemical compounds (bromide, nitrate, ammonium, acetate, sodium, potassium, magnesium, sulfate, chloride, and iron (II)) of these wetlands. We found no correlation between geochemistry with depth, but noticed higher salt contents in the saltwater marshes, and shared geochemistry between the swamp and freshwater flotant wetlands, as expected. Conclusively, this thesis contributes to the understanding of microbial communities to natural fluxes of methane in coastal wetlands and their interaction with the geochemistry of these ecosystems.born digitalmasters thesesZIPXLSXXLSMengCopyright and other restrictions may apply. User is responsible for compliance with all applicable laws. For information about copyright law, please see https://libguides.colostate.edu/copyright.Text