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Predicting change in eelgrass distribution due to sea level rise in three Pacific Northwest estuaries
Citation:
CLINTON, P. J., M. R. FRAZIER, L. McCoy, D. REUSSER, AND H. LEE, II. Predicting change in eelgrass distribution due to sea level rise in three Pacific Northwest estuaries. Presented at ESRi Users Conference, San Diego, CA, July 23 - 27, 2012.
Impact/Purpose:
The eelgrass species Zostera marina is the dominant estuarine seagrass on the Pacific Northwest coast of North America and provides important ecosystem services and functions.
Description:
The eelgrass species Zostera marina is the dominant estuarine seagrass on the Pacific Northwest coast of North America and provides important ecosystem services and functions. The loss of eelgrass bed acreage due to environmental pressures is of world-wide concern, yet predicted spatial redistribution of intertidal eelgrass beds under climate-change induced sea-level rise is largely unexplored through spatially explicit modeling. Here, we construct a model predicting the spatial redistribution of the intertidal eelgrass Zostera marina under varying sea-level rise scenarios in three estuaries on the Oregon coast using ArcGis tools. Using remarkably few spatial datasets, the model exploits known relationships between eelgrass and physical constraints to bed expansion to provide coefficients to a predictive regression. At this stage of development, the model dubbed BATHTUB (Bathymetry Affecting Tidal Habitats Toward Upland Boundaries) explores only the effects of bathymetric changes and not other climate change induced effects in temperature, salinity, precipitation or hydrological change. We are working with the developers of the SLAMM (Sea Level Affecting Marshes Model) to incorporate our findings into their model.