Collaborative Research: Watershed, estuarine, and local drivers of coastal marsh establishment and resilience

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Salt marshes provide numerous ecosystem services including shoreline protection, nutrient cycling, pollutant filtration, nurseries for fish and crustaceans, food production, recreation, and carbon sequestration. Coastal wetlands have been degraded and lost because of changes to upland and coastal environments, and future sea-level rise threatens to exacerbate these trends. This project will advance scientific understanding of the mechanisms that influence marsh formation, persistence, and degradation, which is essential to forecasting future wetland change. The project aims to develop a new way to analyze the vulnerability of marshes that will be relevant to decision-making. Through a student-organized symposium, the work will be communicated directly to policy-makers and practitioners of marsh conservation and restoration. This project will advance science teaching and education both through training the next generation of university students and working with youth in local high schools. Coastal wetlands are complex biogeomorphic systems that provide important ecosystem services, but our current understanding of salt marsh evolution and projections of future changes are based on models and empirical studies of limited spatial and temporal extent. In this project, the team asks "what determines the present, continental-scale extent and distribution of coastal marshes"? They hypothesize that marsh distributions reflect interactions across a wide range of spatial scales, including local biogeomorphic feedbacks, estuarine-scale morphology that governs sediment gradients and wave energy, and past and present watershed processes that influence sediment and water flux. The team proposes an integrated theoretical and empirical approach that takes advantage of continental-scale variation in watershed and estuarine characteristics to understand (1) when, where, and how salt marshes have established, and (2) how marsh distributions respond to sea-level rise, altered suspended sediment concentrations, and other environmental changes.