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The loss of coastal marshes is a topic of great concern, because these habitats provide tangible ecosystem services and are at risk from sea-level rise and human activities. In recent years, significant effort has gone into understanding and modeling the relationships between the biological and physical factors that contribute to marsh stability. Simulation-based process models suggest that marsh stability is the product of a complex feedback between sediment supply, flooding regime and vegetation response, resulting in elevation gains sufficient to match the combination of relative sea-level rise and losses from erosion. However, there have been few direct, empirical tests of these models, because long-term datasets...
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Tidal saline wetlands in the Northern Gulf of Mexico (NGoM) are dynamic and frequently disturbed systems that provide myriad ecosystem services. For these services to be sustained, dominant macrophytes must continuously recolonize and establish after disturbance. Macrophytes accomplish this regeneration through combinations of vegetative propagation and sexual reproduction, the relative importance of which varies by species. Concurrently, tidal saline wetland systems experience both anthropogenic and natural hydrologic alterations, such as levee construction, sea-level rise, storm impacts, and restoration activities. These hydrologic alterations can affect the success of plant regeneration, leading to large-scale,...
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We assessed the resilience of wetlands to sea-level rise along a transitional gradient from tidal freshwater forested wetland (TFFW) to oligohaline marsh by measuring processes controlling wetland elevation. We identified fundamental differences in how resilience is maintained across wetland community types, which have important implications for management activities that aim to restore or conserve resilient systems.
Categories: Data;
Types: Map Service,
OGC WFS Layer,
OGC WMS Layer,
OGC WMS Service;
Tags: Georgia,
Savannah River,
South Carolina,
USGS Science Data Catalog (SDC),
Waccamaw River, All tags...
accretion,
coastal wetlands,
elevation change,
oligohaline marsh,
resilience,
sea-level rise,
tidal freshwater forested wetland,
wetland RSLR, Fewer tags
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Coastal wetlands store more carbon than most ecosystems globally. However, little is known about the mechanisms that control the loss of organic matter in coastal wetlands at the landscape scale, and how sea-level rise will impact this important ecological function.
Categories: Data;
Types: Citation,
Map Service,
OGC WFS Layer,
OGC WMS Layer,
OGC WMS Service;
Tags: Barataria Basin,
Louisiana,
Organic matter decomposition,
Terrebonne Basin,
asymptote, All tags...
cellulose decay,
coastal wetlands,
decay constant,
flooding,
labile carbon,
landscape scale,
lignin content,
litter quality,
nitrogen content,
refractory carbon,
salinity,
sea-level rise, Fewer tags
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Mangrove wetland restoration and creation efforts are increasingly proposed as mechanisms to compensate for mangrove wetland losses. However, ecosystem development and functional equivalence in restored and created mangrove wetlands are poorly understood. We compared a 20-year chronosequence of created tidal wetland sites in Tampa Bay, Florida (USA) to natural reference mangrove wetlands. Across the chronosequence, our sites represent the succession from salt marsh to mangrove forest communities. Our results identify important soil and plant structural differences between the created and natural reference wetland sites; however, they also depict a positive developmental trajectory for the created wetland sites that...
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