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"Salt marshes"
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Saltmarshes : morphodynamics, conservation and engineering significance
Saltmarshes are of increasing interest to a wide range of environmental scientists, engineers, conservationists, and planners concerned with coastal zone management. Seven leading scientists present an overview of the most important questions including geomorphology, ecology, conservation and engineering significance.
Book
world of the salt marsh
The World of the Salt Marsh is a wide-ranging exploration of the southeastern coast-its natural history, its people and their way of life, and the historic and ongoing threats to its ecological survival. Focusing on areas from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, to Cape Canaveral, Florida, Charles Seabrook examines the ecological importance of the salt marsh, calling it \"a biological factory without equal.\" Twice-daily tides carry in a supply of nutrients that nourish vast meadows of spartina (Spartina alterniflora)-a crucial habitat for creatures ranging from tiny marine invertebrates to wading birds. The meadows provide vital nurseries for 80 percent of the seafood species, including oysters, crabs, shrimp, and a variety of finfish, and they are invaluable for storm protection, erosion prevention, and pollution filtration. Seabrook is also concerned with the plight of the people who make their living from the coast's bounty and who carry on its unique culture. Among them are Charlie Phillips, a fishmonger whose livelihood is threatened by development in McIntosh County, Georgia, and Vera Manigault of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, a basket maker of Gullah-Geechee descent, who says that the sweetgrass needed to make her culturally significant wares is becoming scarcer. For all of the biodiversity and cultural history of the salt marshes, many still view them as vast wastelands to be drained, diked, or \"improved\" for development into highways and subdivisions. If people can better understand and appreciate these ecosystems, Seabrook contends, they are more likely to join the growing chorus of scientists, conservationists, fishermen, and coastal visitors and residents calling for protection of these truly amazing places.
eBook
Salt marshes : function, dynamics, and stresses
\"Salt marshes are highly dynamic and important ecosystems that dampen impacts of coastal storms and are an integral part of tidal wetland systems, which sequester half of all global marine carbon. They are now being threatened due to sea-level rise, decreased sediment influx, and human encroachment. This book provides a comprehensive review of the latest salt marsh science, investigating their functions and how they are responding to stresses through formation of salt pannes and pools, headward erosion of tidal creeks, marsh-edge erosion, ice-fracturing, and ice-rafted sedimentation. Written by experts in marsh ecology, coastal geomorphology, wetland biology, estuarine hydrodynamics, and coastal sedimentation, it provides a multidisciplinary summary of recent advancements in our knowledge of salt marshes. The future of wetlands and potential deterioration of salt marshes is also considered, providing a go-to reference for graduate students and researchers studying these coastal systems, as well as marsh managers and restoration scientists\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Coastal regime shifts: rapid responses of coastal wetlands to changes in mangrove cover
Global changes are causing broad-scale shifts in vegetation communities worldwide, including coastal habitats where the borders between mangroves and salt marsh are in flux. Coastal habitats provide numerous ecosystem services of high economic value, but the consequences of variation in mangrove cover are poorly known. We experimentally manipulated mangrove cover in large plots to test a set of linked hypotheses regarding the effects of changes in mangrove cover. We found that changes in mangrove cover had strong effects on microclimate, plant community, sediment accretion, soil organic content, and bird abundance within 2 yr. At higher mangrove cover, wind speed declined and light interception by vegetation increased. Air and soil temperatures had hump-shaped relationships with mangrove cover. The cover of salt marsh plants decreased at higher mangrove cover. Wrack cover, the distance that wrack was distributed from the water's edge, and sediment accretion decreased at higher mangrove cover. Soil organic content increased with mangrove cover. Wading bird abundance decreased at higher mangrove cover. Many of these relationships were non-linear, with the greatest effects when mangrove cover varied from zero to intermediate values, and lesser effects when mangrove cover varied from intermediate to high values. Temporal and spatial variation in measured variables often peaked at intermediate mangrove cover, with ecological consequences that are largely unexplored. Because different processes varied in different ways with mangrove cover, the \"optimum\" cover of mangroves from a societal point of view will depend on which ecosystem services are most desired.
Journal Article
Marsh Collapse Does Not Require Sea Level Rise
Salt marshes are among the most productive ecosystems on Earth, providing nurseries for fish species and shelter and food for endangered birds. Salt marshes also mitigate the impacts of hurricanes and tsunamis, and sequester large volumes of carbon in their peat soil. Understanding the mechanisms responsible for marsh stability or deterioration is therefore a key issue for society. Sea level rise is often viewed as the main driver of salt marsh deterioration. However, while salt marshes can reach equilibrium in the vertical direction, they are inherently unstable in the horizontal direction. Marsh expansion driven by sediment supply rarely matches lateral erosion by waves, creating a dynamic landscape. Recent results show that marsh collapse can occur in the absence of sea level rise if the rate at which sediment is eroded at marsh boundaries is higher than the input of sediment from nearby rivers or from the continental shelf. We propose that the horizontal dynamics and related sediment fluxes are key factors determining the survival of salt marshes. Only a complete sediment budget between salt marshes and nearby tidal flats can determine the fate of marshes at any given location, with sea level rise being only one among many external drivers. Ancient Venetians understood this dynamic very well. They manipulated the supply of sediment to the Venice lagoon, Italy, in order to control the long-term evolution of the intertidal landscape.
Journal Article
The value of estuarine and coastal ecosystem services
The global decline in estuarine and coastal ecosystems (ECEs) is affecting a number of critical benefits, or ecosystem services. We review the main ecological services across a variety of ECEs, including marshes, mangroves, nearshore coral reefs, seagrass beds, and sand beaches and dunes. Where possible, we indicate estimates of the key economic values arising from these services, and discuss how the natural variability of ECEs impacts their benefits, the synergistic relationships of ECEs across seascapes, and management implications. Although reliable valuation estimates are beginning to emerge for the key services of some ECEs, such as coral reefs, salt marshes, and mangroves, many of the important benefits of seagrass beds and sand dunes and beaches have not been assessed properly. Even for coral reefs, marshes, and mangroves, important ecological services have yet to be valued reliably, such as cross-ecosystem nutrient transfer (coral reefs), erosion control (marshes), and pollution control (mangroves). An important issue for valuing certain ECE services, such as coastal protection and habitat-–fishery linkages, is that the ecological functions underlying these services vary spatially and temporally. Allowing for the connectivity between ECE habitats also may have important implications for assessing the ecological functions underlying key ecosystems services, such coastal protection, control of erosion, and habitat-–fishery linkages. Finally, we conclude by suggesting an action plan for protecting and/or enhancing the immediate and longer-term values of ECE services. Because the connectivity of ECEs across land-–sea gradients also influences the provision of certain ecosystem services, management of the entire seascape will be necessary to preserve such synergistic effects. Other key elements of an action plan include further ecological and economic collaborative research on valuing ECE services, improving institutional and legal frameworks for management, controlling and regulating destructive economic activities, and developing ecological restoration options.
Journal Article
Herbivory drives zonation of stress-tolerant marsh plants
Ecological studies of plant distributions along environmental gradients, such as plant zonation in salt marshes, have primarily focused on abiotic stress and plant interactions (competition and facilitation). A decades-old paradigm is that the stressful and benign boundaries of salt marsh plants are determined by abiotic stress and competition, respectively. Although consumers have long been recognized as mediating algal and sessile animal zonation in the rocky intertidal, their role in generating plant zonation in salt marshes remains largely unexplored. We examined the zonation of two annual succulents,
Salicornia europaea
and
Suaeda salsa
, along an elevation gradient in a northern Chinese salt marsh, with and without manipulating the common herbivorous crab
Helice tientsinensis
.
Salicornia
occupies waterlogged, low-salinity habitats, whereas
Suaeda
dominates non-waterlogged, hypersaline habitats at higher elevations. We first conducted a pot experiment crossing salinity, waterlogging, and competition, followed by a field experiment with removal of competitors, and found that neither waterlogging nor salinity stress explained the absence of either species from the other's zone, while
Suaeda
competitively excluded
Salicornia
from the upper non-waterlogged zone. We then conducted field and lab herbivory experiments, which showed that
Helice
preferentially grazed
Suaeda
at waterlogged low elevations and that
Helice
grazing on
Suaeda
increased with waterlogging. These results reveal that while competition plays a role in the zonation by excluding
Salicornia
from the upper
Suaeda
zone, crab grazing limits the success of
Suaeda
in the lower
Salicornia
zone. These findings challenge the idea that plant interactions and abiotic stress are sufficient to explain marsh zonation in all cases, and highlight an overlooked role of consumers, a role potentially general across diverse intertidal ecosystems. Future models of plant distributions should consider how consumer pressure interacts with plant interactions and abiotic stress across environmental gradients.
Journal Article