This perspective article synthesises insights from a 2023 interdisciplinary workshop in Kuching, Malaysia, where 26 experts examined how land use and land cover change (LULCC) impacts Blue Carbon Ecosystems (BCE) in Southeast Asia (SEA) and identified pathways for integrated, science-informed governance. BCE in SEA (mangroves, seagrasses and tidal wetlands) are globally significant carbon sinks, critical to biodiversity and th...

Zooplankton grazing onphytoplankton promotes the release of particulate and dissolved organic matter (DOM) into the water column and therefore plays a key role in organic matter cycling in aquatic systems. Prokaryotes are the main DOM consumers in the ocean by actively remineralizing and transforming it, contributing to its molecular diversification. To explore the molecular composition of zooplankton‐derived DOM and its bioav...

The ocean contains a large reservoir of dissolved organic matter (DOM) that persists for millennia. Both the very dilute concentrations of individual DOM molecules and intrinsic recalcitrance to microbial decay imparted by molecular structure are suggested mechanisms for this long residence time. Here, we report an experiment comparing the responses of surface and deep prokaryotes to DOM isolated and enriched by solid‐phase ex...

Antarctica's continental shelves generate the densest waters in the world and are responsible for the formation of Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW), a water mass with the potential to sequester carbon in the deep ocean for millennia. One such form of marine carbon is dissolved organic carbon (DOC), the ocean's largest standing stock of reduced carbon. In this study, we quantify DOC enrichment in dense shelf waters (DSW) in the Ro...