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

盐沼提供多种生态系统服务，包括海岸线保护、营养循环、污染物过滤、鱼类和甲壳类苗圃、食物生产、娱乐和碳封存。由于高地和沿海环境的变化，沿海湿地已经退化和丧失，未来海平面上升有可能加剧这些趋势。该项目将促进对影响沼泽形成、持续和退化的机制的科学理解，这对预测未来的湿地变化至关重要。该项目旨在开发一种新的方法来分析沼泽的脆弱性，这将与决策相关。通过学生组织的研讨会，这项工作将直接传达给湿地保护和恢复的政策制定者和实践者。该项目将通过培训下一代大学生和在当地高中与青年合作来促进科学教学和教育。滨海湿地是复杂的生物地貌系统，提供重要的生态系统服务，但我们目前对盐沼演变的理解和对未来变化的预测是基于有限的空间和时间范围的模型和实证研究。在这个项目中，研究小组提出的问题是“是什么决定了现在大陆规模的沿海沼泽的范围和分布？”他们假设，沼泽分布反映了广泛空间尺度上的相互作用，包括局部生物地貌反馈、控制沉积物梯度和波能的河口尺度形态，以及影响沉积物和水通量的过去和现在的分水岭过程。该团队提出了一种综合的理论和经验方法，利用分水岭和河口特征的大陆尺度变化来了解(1)盐沼何时、何地和如何形成，以及(2)沼泽分布如何响应海平面上升、悬浮泥沙浓度变化和其他环境变化。

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.