Hybrid Spatiotemporal Framework for Marsh Climate Forcing: Biogeochemical Thresholds, Flux Prediction, Site Optimization

Overview

California’s $500+ million marsh restoration program assumes restored wetlands provide net climate benefits, yet no systematic framework exists for predicting whether specific restoration designs will be climate-positive or climate-negative. I present the first integrated framework resolving the biogeochemical controls governing a restored marsh’s true climate forcing. Using self-engineered flux chambers, I measured methane and CO₂ across San Francisco Bay’s 2–32 PSU salinity gradient, combining field data with a multi-modal dataset spanning greenhouse gas flux records, sediment biogeochemistry, metagenomic sequences, and decade-scale hydrological time series. Field measurements revealed brackish marshes suppress methane 75–80% relative to freshwater sites, with suppression intensifying above 18 PSU as sulfate-driven exclusion of methanogens dominates. Through metagenomic screening of publicly archived Bay sediment data, I identified novel Ferrous Iron Sulfate Oxidizers (FISO) bacteria encoding co-located iron oxidation and sulfide reoxidation genes, predominantly enriched in methane-suppressed zones, creating a self-reinforcing sulfate regeneration mechanism absent from current biogeochemical models. To capture these nonlinear dynamics, I developed a Physics-Informed Temporal Fusion Transformer integrating attention mechanisms with physics-based constraints encoding sulfate-methane competition and mass balance equations. Sulfate availability indices and iron-sulfur coupling ratios drove R² = 0.91 forecasting net 20-year climate forcing across 10-fold spatiotemporal cross-validation. Monte Carlo Sampled Shapley Value analysis confirmed sulfate availability and FISO abundance as dominant predictive drivers. Outputs feed a composite Health Index scoring climate forcing, biodiversity, and resilience, delivered as a web application with interactive GIS mapping and site-specific recommendations. This gives California its first evidence-based framework for engineering restored marshes that are quantifiably, not presumptively, climate-positive.

Competition history

• CSEF 2026 Earth & Environmental Sciences(Senior Division) · Entry S-08-10

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