The Case for a Critical Zone Science Approach to Research on Estuarine and Coastal Wetlands in the Anthropocene
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The Case for a Critical Zone Science Approach to Research on Estuarine and Coastal Wetlands in the Anthropocene Min Liu 1,2 & Lijun Hou 3 & Yi Yang 1 & Limin Zhou 1,2 & Michael E. Meadows 1,4,5 Received: 18 November 2019 / Revised: 1 September 2020 / Accepted: 8 October 2020 # The Author(s) 2020, corrected publication 2020
Abstract As the focus of land-sea interactions, estuarine and coastal ecosystems perform numerous vital ecological service functions, although they are highly vulnerable to various kinds of disturbance, both directly and indirectly related to human activity, that have attracted much recent attention. Critical zone science (CZS) has emerged as a valuable conceptual framework that focuses on quantitative interactions between diverse components of the environment and is able to integrate anthropogenic disturbance with a view to predicting future trajectories of change. However, coastal and estuarine environments appear to have been overlooked in CZS and are notably under-represented, indeed not explicitly represented at all, in the global network of critical zone observatories (CZOs). Even in the wider network of environmental observatories globally, estuarine and coastal wetland ecosystems are only very rarely an explicit focus. Further strengthening of integrated research in coastal and estuarine environments is required, more especially given the threats these ecosystems face due to growing population at the coast and against the background of climate change and sea level rise. The establishment of one or more CZOs, or their functional equivalents, with a strong focus on estuarine and coastal wetlands, should be urgently attended to. Keywords Coastal environments . Ecosystem services . Human impact . Critical zone observatories . CZO . CZEN . LTER . NEON
Introduction: The Value of Coastal and Estuarine Wetlands Communicated by Kenneth L. Heck Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12237-020-00851-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Michael E. Meadows [email protected] 1
Key Laboratory of Geographic Information Science (Ministry of Education); School of Geographical Sciences, East China Normal University, 500 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai 200241, China
2
Institute of Eco-Chongming, East China Normal University, 500 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai 200241, China
3
State Key Laboratory of Estuarine and Coastal Research, East China Normal University, 3663 North Zhongshan Road, Shanghai 200062, China
4
Department of Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town 7701, South Africa
5
College of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua 321004, China
Estuarine and coastal regions lie at the nexus of land and ocean and are characterized by a diverse array of coupled geophysical, chemical and biological processes. The complexity of interactions between the various elements and processes has produced a highly sensitive
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