Boosting saltmarsh management for fisheries species

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This PhD will deliver fundamental research in support of managing saltmarshes, a coastal ecosystem with apurported, yet unqualified, role as a nursery habitat for UK fisheries species. Saltmarshes provide multipleecosystem services, including flood protection, blue carbon sequestration and water quality remediation (Hudson etal. 2021). They are central to Nature Based Solutions (NBS) of Shoreline Management Planning (SMP2),biodiversity conservation and emerging blue-carbon offsetting. Marshes are a priority habitat for restoration andconservation (25 Year Environment Plan, Defra) and integral to national biodiversity management (e.g., EnglandBiodiversity 2020 Strategy).Historically, British saltmarshes were depleted to < 1/4 of their cover, many through land-conversion for agriculture(Hudson et al. 2021). Restoring marshes is costly, involving significant engineering through 'managedrealignment', where defences are breached to convert terrestrial land into saltmarsh. Currently, the annual rate ofrestoration lags strongly behind the rate of losses (45 vs105 hectares/year) (Miles & Richardson 2018). The biggestbarrier to implementing restoration is insufficient data to enable otherwise powerful instruments such as NBS,Payment for Ecosystem services (PES) and National Habitat Compensation Programmes (Hudson et al. 2021). ThisPhD will incentivise these instruments through quantitative substantiation of the ecological benefits of marshrestoration and conservation to fisheries species.Several species that use marshes have high fisheries value (e.g., seabass, mullet, brown shrimp), but are threatened(eel) or their management is limited by data scarcity on nursery habitats (e.g., seabass, Defra 2021). Working withand at the Wildfowl & Wetland Trust (WWT), the student will couple environmental research to stakeholder andpolicy analyses, to identify barriers and solutions to boosting marsh management for fisheries species. The projectincludes contrasts between natural and restored sites to inform on restoration benefits to fisheries.