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Salt Marsh Sustainability in New England: Progress and Remaining Challenges.
Citation:
Wigand, C. AND S. Balogh. Salt Marsh Sustainability in New England: Progress and Remaining Challenges. National Conference on Ecosystem Restoration, New Orleans, Louisiana, August 26 - 30, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
The US EPA provides technical assistance to the New England states in the development of climate adaptation and restoration methods to build resiliency of coastal wetlands. In addition, the EPA has worked with the New England states to assist with incorporating a social-ecological systems approach into the adaptive management framework when defining problems and restoration goals, selecting climate adaptation methods, and building coastal resiliency. The partnerships and engagement of community, non-governmental, state, regional, and federal groups have made current New England resiliency coastal projects a success.
Description:
Notable progress has been made in assessing, monitoring, and managing coastal marshes in New England because of strong cooperation and partnerships across agencies, universities, and other organizations. Natural resource managers, conservationists, and scientists have documented and begun to manage marsh loss and degradation in many coastal systems, and furthermore have gained a better understanding of coastal marsh vulnerability, resiliency, and sustainability. Significant relationships of accelerated sea-level rise and other anthropogenic stressors with coastal marsh loss (e.g., creek and channel widening; interior ponding; creek bank erosion) are reported. The adaptive management framework has new emphasis on incorporating a social-ecological systems approach when defining problems and restoration goals, selecting climate adaptation methods, and building coastal resiliency. We highlight the evolution of the climate adaptation framework to better understand the underlying social and ecological processes and dynamic feedbacks to sustain coastal marshes. Some remaining challenges for social and ecosystem scientists are development of predictive, dynamic models to forecast coastal marsh resiliency to sea level rise, storm surges, and multiple stressors, and the incorporation of socio-economic parameters into models and indicators of coastal resilience. Using ongoing restoration projects in New England as examples, we describe the process for selecting climate adaptation actions (e.g., thin layer placement; restoring hydrology) and the partnerships and engagement of community, non-governmental, state, regional, and federal groups in making these coastal restoration and sustainability projects a success.