4.6 Article

Onset of runaway fragmentation of salt marshes

Journal

ONE EARTH
Volume 4, Issue 4, Pages 506-516

Publisher

CELL PRESS
DOI: 10.1016/j.oneear.2021.02.013

Keywords

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Funding

  1. Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES)
  2. National Science Foundation Coastal SEES program [1426981]
  3. National Science Foundation GLD program [1529245]
  4. National Science Foundation CAREER program [1654374]
  5. National Science Foundation LTER program [1237733]
  6. Directorate For Geosciences
  7. Division Of Earth Sciences [1654374, 1529245] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
  8. Division Of Environmental Biology
  9. Direct For Biological Sciences [1237733] Funding Source: National Science Foundation

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Research shows that the threshold for marsh fragmentation along coastal areas is primarily related to tidal range, and sediment supply is relevant only when tides are enough to transport sediment to the marsh interior. Organic matter accumulation controls the threshold of relative sea level rise in marsh ecosystems, explaining the fragmentation of microtidal marshes.
Salt marshes are valuable but vulnerable coastal ecosystems that adapt to relative sea level rise (RSLR) by accumulating organic matter and inorganic sediment. The natural limit of these processes defines a threshold rate of RSLR beyond which marshes drown, resulting in ponding and conversion to open waters. We develop a simplified formulation for sediment transport across marshes to show that pond formation leads to runaway marsh fragmentation, a process characterized by a self-similar hierarchy of pond sizes with power-law distributions. We find the threshold for marsh fragmentation scales primarily with tidal range and that sediment supply is only relevant where tides are sufficient to transport sediment to the marsh interior. Thus the RSLR threshold is controlled by organic accretion in microtidal marshes regardless of the suspended sediment concentration at the marsh edge. This explains the observed fragmentation of microtidal marshes and suggests a tipping point for widespread marsh loss.

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