Modeling Salt Panne Land-Cover Suitability under Sea-Level Rise

Abstract

ABSTRACT Linhoss, A.C. and Underwood, W.V., 2016. Modeling salt panne land-cover suitability under sea-level rise. Salt pannes are an ecologically important but poorly understood feature of the salt marsh environments. Like all coastal marshes, salt pannes are threatened by sea-level rise; therefore, it is important to assess how they will be affected by rising seas. Because of a lack of understanding regarding salt panne formation and the possibly stochastic nature of their development, a traditional and purely deterministic modeling approach is unsuitable for assessing the impacts of sea-level rise on salt pannes. This research used a combination of deterministic and stochastic models to simulate the land-cover suitability for salt pannes in the Grand Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, Mississippi, under five sea-level rise scenarios, including a rise of 0.25, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 m by 2100. The Sea-Level Affecting Marshes Model (SLAMM) simulated general land-cover at the study site. However, SL...