Offshore catches of banana prawns, Penaeus merguiensis, are correlated with the extent of mangrove forests. However, recent evaluation has questioned whether the apparent relationship between juvenile penaeids and mangroves reflects specific utilisation of mangroves or just the use of shallow, organically rich, muddy habitats. We investigated this by focussing on juvenile P. merguiensis within ...

BACKGROUND Estuaries are highly productive ecosystems that can export organic matter to coastal seas (the 'outwelling hypothesis'). However the role of this food resource subsidy on coastal ecosystem functioning has not been examined. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We investigated the influence of estuarine primary production as a resource subsidy and the influence of estuaries on biodiversit...

Freshwater fraction and tidal prism models are simple methods for estimating the turnover time of estuarine water. The freshwater fraction method prominently features flushing by freshwater inflow and has sometimes been criticized because it appears not to include flushing by seawater, but this is accounted for implicitly because the average estuary salinity used in the calculation reflects all...

The performance of several models used to estimate land-derived N loads to shallow receiving estuaries are compared. Models included in the comparison differed in complexity and approach, and predicted either loads or concentrations in estuary water. In all cases, model predictions were compared to measured loads or concentrations, as appropriate. Measured N loads to 9 estuaries on Cape Cod, MA...

Nitrogen (N) removal from estuaries is driven in part by sedimentary microbial processes. The processes of denitrification and anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anammox) remove N from estuaries by producing di-nitrogen gas, and each can be coupled to N recycling pathways such as nitrification and dissimilatory nitrate reduction to ammonium (DNRA). Environmental conditions in estuaries influence sed...