Citation:

Burman, E., N. Merrill, K. Mulvaney, M. Bradley, AND C. Wigand. This Land is Your Land, This Could Be Marsh Land: Property Parcel Characteristics of Marsh Migration Corridors in Rhode Island, USA. NEERS Spring Meeting 2023, Brooklyn, NY, April 27 - 29, 2023.

Impact/Purpose:

Sea level rise threatens coastal salt marshes, which are highly-productive habitats that provide humans with many ecosystem services. Marshes may be able to migrate landward and persist if permeable land is available to them. However, in highly-developed coastal areas such as Rhode Island, human infrastructure and properties lie in the path of marsh migration corridors. We identify characteristics of property parcels within projected marsh migration corridors in Rhode Island, finding that marshes may move from predominately public parcels to predominately private parcels, and that parcels containing projected future marsh have higher assessed values than those containing marsh today. As governments and coastal resilience practitioners work to prepare coastlines for higher sea levels, these findings can inform how and where to focus efforts to facilitate marsh migration. Stakeholders such as state, local, and federal government, as well as nonprofits and other parties interested in coastal resilience, may use analyses like these to prioritize areas well-suited for acquisition for conservation, as well as identify challenges and tradeoffs in balancing the needs of coastal communities and migrating wetlands.

Description:

Salt marshes, critical habitats offering many ecosystem services, are threatened by development, sea level rise (SLR) and other anthropogenic stressors that are projected to worsen. As seas rise, salt marshes can migrate inland if there is adjacent, undeveloped, permeable land available. Facilitating marsh migration is necessary for coastal resilience efforts, but extensive coastal development can make finding suitable migration corridors challenging. This work seeks to characterize the property parcels within Rhode Island’s 2050 projected marsh extent in 2050. We find that most parcels currently containing salt marsh are publicly owned, whereas most adjacent parcels projected to contain new salt marsh by 2050 are privately owned. Additionally, parcels containing new marsh in 2050 have 47% higher per-hectare assessed values than parcels containing current marsh. We also describe the locations and characteristics of parcels within migration corridors with the lowest per-hectare values that may be the most cost-effective to acquire for marsh conservation. This study highlights the expanding land use types and landowner sets that will be involved in marsh conservation decisions, and the economic value of potential migration corridors where costly tradeoffs may be necessary to promote coastal resilience.

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