3.2.1 Within-site comparisons
Without considering stream restoration intervention, the long-term carbon sequestration potential at a particular degraded site could be conceptually considered as the difference in carbon stocks between reference and degraded categories. Accordingly, the short-term carbon storage since restoration, if any, could be represented conceptually by the difference between degraded and treatment categories. We examined relationships of carbon stock via within-site comparisons, where we compared carbon stocks between degraded, treatment, and reference categories within one site using ANOVA tests and pairwise comparisons between treatments using the emmeans package in R version 4.2.2 (Lenth 2023, R Core Team 2022).