Abstract
Abstract. Tidal flats provide valuable ecosystem services such as flood protection and carbon sequestration. Erosion and accretion processes govern the ecogeomorphic evolution of intertidal ecosystems (marshes and bare flats) and, hence, substantially affect their valuable ecosystem services. To understand the intertidal ecosystem development, high-frequency bed-level change data are thus needed. However, such datasets are scarce due to the lack of suitable methods that do not involve excessive labour and/or costly instruments. By applying newly developed surface elevation dynamics (SED) sensors, we obtained unique high-resolution daily bed-level change datasets in the period 2013–2017 from 10 marsh–mudflat sites situated in the Netherlands, Belgium, and the United Kingdom in contrasting physical and biological settings. At each site, multiple sensors were deployed for 9–20 months to ensure sufficient spatial and temporal coverage of highly variable bed-level change processes. The bed-level change data are provided with synchronized hydrodynamic data, i.e. water level, wave height, tidal current velocity, medium sediment grain size (D50), and chlorophyll a level at four sites. This dataset has revealed diverse spatial morphodynamics patterns over daily to seasonal scales, which are valuable to theoretical and model development. On the daily scale, this dataset is particularly instructive, as it includes a number of storm events, the response to which can be detected in the bed-level change observations. Such data are rare but useful to study tidal flat response to highly energetic conditions. The dataset is available from 4TU.ResearchData (https://doi.org/10.4121/12693254.v4; Hu et al., 2020), which is expected to expand with additional SED sensor data from ongoing and planned surveys.
Highlights
Salt marshes and the adjacent tidal flats are co-evolving coastal ecosystems of global importance (Mcowen et al, 2017; Schuerch et al, 2018)
Diatoms act as bio-stabilizers on tidal flats by producing extracellular polymeric substances (EPSs) and as such can affect sediment bed-level dynamics (Underwood and Paterson 1993; Austen et al, 1999; Andersen et al, 2005)
The surface elevation dynamics (SED) sensor data have been proven to be useful in revealing the relations between hydrodynamic forcing and intertidal bed-level dynamics (Hu et al, 2018; Belliard et al, 2019) and understanding the spatial variations in bedlevel dynamics from tidal flats to salt marshes (Wang et al, 2017; Willemsen et al, 2018; Baptist et al, 2019)
Summary
Salt marshes and the adjacent tidal flats are co-evolving coastal ecosystems of global importance (Mcowen et al, 2017; Schuerch et al, 2018). Existing measurements of intertidal bed-level dynamics typically have limited temporal (e.g. two to five tidal cycles) or spatial resolution (e.g. one to two stations) (Whitehouse and Mitchener, 1998; Shi et al, 2014; Zhu et al, 2014; Hunt et al, 2016), as high-resolution datasets require excessive labour or a high cost for instruments (Andersen et al, 2006) In light of these limitations, surface elevation dynamics (SED) sensors have been developed to record daily bed-level dynamics with high accuracy while reducing the unit cost and labour during deployment (Hu et al, 2015). We present the full dataset from 10 sites and briefly discuss the potential research questions that can be addressed by exploring such datasets
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