Coastal Wetland Vulnerability to Relative Sea-Level Rise: Wetland Elevation Trends and Process Controls

Abstract

The distribution of tidal saline wetlands (e.g., salt marshes and mangroves) is increasingly impacted by global environmental change, including human alteration of the world’s coasts and sea-level rise (Kennedy et al. 2002; Poff et al. 2002). Rates of salt marsh and mangrove loss appear to be accelerating (Nicholls et al. 1999).A better understanding of wetland accretionary dynamics, controls and constraints, and in particular responses to sea-level rise is required to inform the maintenance and restoration of these systems. Differences in wetland form and function result from a range of continentaland regional-scale processes (Mitsch and Gosselink 2000). Local geomorphology, climate regime, and hydrology result in differences in sediment supply, primary production and decomposition, subsidence, and autocompaction, resulting in variations in elevation among both salt marsh and mangrove sites. Combinations of these controls mean that individual wetland sites show different degrees of vulnerability to current and near-future environmental change. Several vulnerability assessment approaches have been developed during the past two decades, including the Global Vulnerability Assessment, first developed by Hoozemans et al. (1993) and recently refined in DINAS_COAST (McFadden et al. 2003), and the Coastal Vulnerability Index (Gornitz 1991; Hammar-Klose and Thieler 2001). These approaches offer valuable planning tools for coastal resource managers at the broad (i.e., global, continental, macro-regional) scale as they allow the identification of both patterns of relative vulnerability and vulnerability ‘hotspots’. However, the numerical scores that they produce cannot be easily assigned a precise physical meaning and