McClure, A.; Liu, X.-H.; Hines, E., and Ferner, M.C., 0000. Evaluation of error reduction techniques on a LIDAR-derived salt marsh digital elevation model. Journal of Coastal Research, 00(0), 000–000. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 07490208. Accurate elevation information is a necessity for conservation and management of tidal salt marshes where elevation differences can be as little as 2 m and ...

Top–down and bottom–up effects interact to structure communities, especially in salt marshes, which contain strong gradients in bottom–up drivers such as salinity and nutrients. How omnivorous consumers respond to variation in prey availability and plant quality is poorly understood. We used a mesocosm experiment to examine how salinity, nutrients, an omnivore (the katydid Orchelimum fidicinium...

The establishment of parasites with complex life cycles is generally thought to be regulated by free-living species richness and the stability of local ecological interactions. In this study, we test the prediction that stable host communities are prerequisite for the establishment of complex multi-host parasite life cycles. The colonization of naïve killifish, Fundulus heteroclitus, by parasit...

Given their location in the intertidal zone, coastal salt marshes will be one of the ecosystems first affected by sea level rise. As sea level rise increases, marshes will begin to migrate inland if surrounding topography and land use provide suitable habitat. The question remains whether or not this migration inland will provide enough new habitat to sustain current marsh area as the seaward e...

Several features of the salt marshes of New England are most readily explained on the assumption that sea level has risen during their development." 2 In particular, salt marsh peat occurs at depths many feet below the levels at which it is presently being formed, a fact which is cited among the evidence for subsidence of the coast.3-5 The measurements to be reported of the radiocarbon age of p...

Our study aims to enhance process understanding of the long-term (decadal and longer) cyclic marsh dynamics by identifying the mechanisms that translate large-scale physical forcing in the system into vegetation change, in particular (i) the initiation of lateral erosion on an expanding marsh, and (ii) the control of seedling establishment in front of an eroding marsh-cliff. Short-term sediment...

This study challenges the paradigm that salt marsh plants prevent lateral wave-induced erosion along wetland edges by binding soil with live roots and clarifies the role of vegetation in protecting the coast. In both laboratory flume studies and controlled field experiments, we show that common salt marsh plants do not significantly mitigate the total amount of erosion along a wetland edge. We ...