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RESTORING COASTAL ECOSYSTEMS: ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE
Citation:
CRONIN, T. M. AND H. A. WALKER. RESTORING COASTAL ECOSYSTEMS: ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE. CLIMATIC CHANGE. Springer, New York, NY, 74(4):369-376, (2006).
Impact/Purpose:
To examine ecosystem restoration programs in the context of climate change
Description:
Consensus exists that U.S. coastal ecosystems are severely degraded due to a variety of human-factors requiring large financial expenditures to restore and manage. Yet, even as controversy surrounds human factors in ecosystem degradation in the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay, and elsewhere, long-term coastal ecosystem management and protection should integrate abrupt climate change into restoration research and modeling efforts. Emerging evidence for climate forcing of coastal ecosystem parameters such as precipitation, river discharge, water quality, salinity, turbidity, faunal and phytoplankton dynamics, dissolved oxygen, and other ecosystem processes falls into three categories: (1) monitoring records mostly from the past century, (2) paleoclimate records from sediments, tree rings, and corals during and prior to the historical period, and (3) improved model simulations. Perhaps the most complicated aspect of restoration pertains to spatial and temporal scales. At large spatial scales, such as general circulation climate model simulations of 21st century global changes in river runoff due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing, a consistent picture of future runoff trends does not emerge. Regional climate change can be abrupt and large in scale, but it need not be a surprise if a new adaptive management paradigm is adopted. We recommend that ecosystem restoration programs routinely integrate past and predicted extremes in climate derived from instrumental, paleoclimatological, and modeling studies into coastal ecosystem modeling and management.