Publication Date:
2022-10-27
Description:
© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Donatelli, C., Kalra, T. S., Fagherazzi, S., Zhang, X., & Leonardi, N. Dynamics of marsh-derived sediments in lagoon-type estuaries. Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, 125(12), (2020): e2020JF005751, doi:10.1029/2020JF005751.
Description:
Salt marshes are valuable ecosystems that must trap sediments and accrete in order to counteract the deleterious effect of sea level rise. Previous studies have shown that the capacity of marshes to build up vertically depends on both autogenous and exogenous processes including ecogeomorphic feedbacks and sediment supply from in‐land and coastal ocean. There have been numerous efforts to quantify the role played by the sediments coming from marsh edge erosion on the resistance of salt marshes to sea level rise. However, the majority of existing studies investigating the interplay between lateral and vertical dynamics use simplified modeling approaches, and they do not consider that marsh retreat can affect the regional‐scale hydrodynamics and sediment retention in back‐barrier basins. In this study, we evaluated the fate of the sediments originating from marsh lateral loss by using high‐resolution numerical model simulations of Jamaica Bay, a small lagoonal estuary located in New York City. Our findings show that up to 42% of the sediment released during marsh edge erosion deposits on the shallow areas of the basin and over the vegetated marsh platforms, contributing positively to the sediment budget of the remaining salt marshes. Furthermore, we demonstrate that with the present‐day sediment supply from the ocean, the system cannot keep pace with sea level rise even accounting for the sediment liberated in the bay through marsh degradation. Our study highlights the relevance of multiple sediment sources for the maintenance of the marsh complex.
Description:
This study was supported by the Department of the Interior Hurricane Sandy Recovery program (ID G16AC00455, subaward to University of Liverpool). S. F. was partly supported by NSF awards 1637630 (PIE LTER) and 1832221 (VCR LTER). We thank Robert Chant from Rutgers University for sharing the hydrodynamic measurements in Jamaica Bay.
Keywords:
Marsh erosion
;
Sediment recycling
;
Sea level rise
;
Jamaica Bay
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
