Are elevation and open-water conversion of salt marshes connected?
Geophysical Research Letters
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Abstract
Salt marsh assessments focus on vertical metrics such as accretion or lateral metrics such as open-water conversion, without exploration of how the dimensions are related. We exploited a novel geospatial dataset to explore how elevation is related to the unvegetated-vegetated marsh ratio (UVVR), a lateral metric, across individual marsh “units” within four estuarine-marsh systems. We find that elevation scales consistently with the UVVR across systems, with lower elevation units demonstrating more open-water conversion and higher UVVRs. A normalized elevation-UVVR relationship converges across systems near the system-mean elevation and a UVVR of 0.1, a critical threshold identified by prior studies. This indicates that open-water conversion becomes a dominant lateral instability process at a relatively conservative elevation threshold. We then integrate the UVVR and elevation to yield lifespan estimates, which demonstrate that higher elevation marshes are more resilient to internal deterioration, with an order-of-magnitude longer lifespan than predicted for lower elevation marshes.
Study Area
| Publication type | Article |
|---|---|
| Publication Subtype | Journal Article |
| Title | Are elevation and open-water conversion of salt marshes connected? |
| Series title | Geophysical Research Letters |
| DOI | 10.1029/2019GL086703 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Year Published | 2020 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Wiley |
| Contributing office(s) | Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center |
| Description | e2019GL086703, 10 p. |
| Country | United States |
| State | Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, Virginia |
| Other Geospatial | Plum Island Estuary, Cape Cod National Seashore, Great South Bay, Chincoteague Bay |
| Google Analytic Metrics | Metrics page |