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Land Reclamation Controls on Multi-Centennial Estuarine Evolution

Reinier Schrijvershof, Bas van Maren, Mick van der Wegen, and Ton Hoitink
https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EF005080

For this research we studied the impact of land reclamation in the Ems estuary on its morphological development. These land reclamations started centuries ago and now cumulatively impact the evolution of the estuary together with other, more recent, human interventions (dredging, port construction). To isolate the impact of the land reclamations we reconstructed the morphological evolution of the estuary over the past 500 years from historical maps, nautical charts, and recent observations. The research shows that the response of the estuary to the loss of intertidal areas is infilling of the tidal channels and that the estuary is evolving towards a new channel-flat configuration since the reclamations stopped in the beginning of the 20th century. This response corresponds to the evolution that you can expect from (tidal asymmetry-based) stability theory, suggesting that we can anticipate on the evolution of comparable tidal systems that are more recently impacted by land reclamations (for example in Asia).

Land surface reclaimed in the region of the Ems estuary, with the year of completion indicated in the reclaimed area. The background color-scale visualizes the present-day topo-bathymetric Digital Elevation Model, compiled from multiple sources (see Open Research section, Section 5).