Coastal land managers need vetted scientific information and user-driven tools to understand salt marsh vulnerability, and to make informed decisions on management and policy actions to increase coastal resiliency and protect vital habitats. Our project comparing model predictions of historic marsh change will contribute to a framework for understanding the longevity and future flood mitigation capacity of our coastal marshes.
Why We Care
Coastal marsh environments exist at the intersection of human populations and the ocean. They provide economic output through commercial fisheries, tourism, and recreation and protect coastal communities during storm events. In making decisions regarding marshes, managers often rely on predictive models to assess vulnerabilities to changing conditions (e.g., water levels) with associated uncertainty in model projections. There is a need to evaluate the accuracy of existing marsh models and their utility to wetland managers and users through a coordinated approach that will enable more robust and reliable predictions. This project will advance coastal marsh predictions and create pathways to support wetland managers’ informed use of marsh models at a national operational level.
What We Are Doing
The project will include a 40-year (circa 1985–2025) retrospective modeling study of four to five marsh models for two study sites: Grand Bay Estuary in coastal Alabama and Plum Island Estuary in coastal Massachusetts. This will include: 1) compiling a standardized library of historic digital landscapes for marsh model initialization and calibration, and 2) assessing model performance for each study site. Throughout the project, active engagement with users will be prioritized to ensure the alignment of project deliverables with user expectations and outcomes.
Benefits of Our Work
This effort will also support a broader interagency effort to create an authoritative framework for applying marsh model predictions to guide future investments in data acquisition and ensemble modeling and streamline the evaluation of restoration or protection actions. Deliverables will include high-resolution predictions of how the coastline has changed with storms and flood inundation. Ultimately, the resulting framework for hindcasting changes across coastal marsh habitats will give rise to a modeling testbed, the Coastal Operational Assessment System Testbed for Wetlands (COAST4W), that can be expanded nationwide.
The project team includes scientists and extension specialists at the University of Georgia, NOAA, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, The Water Institute, and Mississippi State University and the Program for Local Adaptation to Climate Effects (PLACE).
This project is funded through the U.S. IOOS Coastal and Ocean Modeling Testbed (COMT).