Are Tidal Salt Marshes Exposed to Nutrient Pollution more Vulnerable to Sea Level Rise?
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WETLANDS CONSERVATION
Are Tidal Salt Marshes Exposed to Nutrient Pollution more Vulnerable to Sea Level Rise? Johannes R. Krause 1
&
Elizabeth Burke Watson 1 & Cathleen Wigand 2 & Nicole Maher 3
Received: 18 July 2019 / Accepted: 26 November 2019 # Society of Wetland Scientists 2019
Abstract Over the past four decades, Long Island, NY, USA, has lost coastal wetlands at a rate of 4% per decade due to submergence. In this study, we examined relationships between the rate of tidal salt marsh loss and environmental factors, including marsh elevation, tidal range, and wastewater exposure through analysis of stable isotope ratios of marsh soils and biota. Our goal was to identify factors that increase vulnerability of marshes to sea level rise, with a specific emphasis on the potential role of poor water quality in hastening marsh loss. Our results suggest that wastewater exposure may accelerate loss of intertidal marsh, but does not negatively impact high tidal marsh resilience to sea level rise. And while marsh elevation and tidal range were statistically significant predictors of marsh loss, they similarly displayed opposite relationships among marsh zones. This study suggests that different functional zones of coastal salt marshes may not respond similarly to global change factors, and that elevation may be an important factor mediating eutrophication effects to coastal salt marshes. Keywords Tidal marsh . Climate change . Wastewater . Nutrient pollution . New York . Long Island
Introduction Coastal wetlands are valuable ecosystems that provide habitat for numerous marine and terrestrial species, improve water Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-019-01254-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Johannes R. Krause [email protected] Elizabeth Burke Watson [email protected] Cathleen Wigand [email protected] Nicole Maher [email protected] 1
Department of Biodiversity, Earth & Environmental Sciences and the Academy of Natural Sciences, Drexel University, 1900 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy, Philadelphia, PA 19103, USA
2
ORD-NHEERL, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Narragansett, RI, USA
3
The Nature Conservancy Long Island Chapter, Uplands Farm Sanctuary, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, USA
quality, stabilize coastlines, attenuate coastal flooding, and sequester atmospheric carbon (Costanza et al. 1997; Kennish 2001). These important ecosystems are projected to decline by 10% to 45% in area by 2100 (Craft et al. 2009), due to rates of sea level rise (SLR) and submergence exceeding rates of elevation gain, a process that has been referred to as ‘marsh drowning’ (Orson et al. 1985; Kirwan et al. 2010). Coastal wetlands in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic region are particularly vulnerable to SLR due to local subsidence from isostatic readjustment following the last glaciation (Engelhart et al. 2009), as well as changes in pressure gradients between the Gulf Stream and coastal waters that are causing SLR acceleration (Sa
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