The climate crisis exposes low-lying coastal zones to increasing flood risk resulting from sea level rise and increased storminess. Ongoing economic activities and population growth further exacerbate these flood risks, simultaneously compromising coastal ecosystems that are already suffering biodiversity losses. As a consequence, coastal ecosystems including salt marshes are in decline globally. Although global decline characterizes salt marshes, they can serve as Nature-based Solutions (NbS) contributing to climate change adaptation and mitigation for coastal zones and their communities. Salt marshes, recognized as Ecosystem Services (ES) providers, aid climate change adaptation and mitigation by attenuating waves, reducing erosion, and sequestering carbon, while simultaneously preserving biodiversity. Despite their potential, limited knowledge exists regarding the long-term functioning of these ES, biodiversity, trade-offs and synergies in NbS and field-based evidence is lacking. Moreover, ES and biodiversity are typically assessed individually rather than through a multiservice-approach including the effects of climate change.
This proposal aims to create a fundamental quantitative understanding of the relation between marsh development and ES, aiding the development of guidelines for NbS with salt marshes that enable climate change adaptation and mitigation.
A multimethodological approach will be used to quantify (in)organic aboveground and belowground development of marshes. Short-term quantitative field-evidence will be collected in contemporary NbS, supplemented with long-term data from well-documented salt marshes. A database combining field data, historical data and a cultural biography (timeline of adaptive management) will then be used for the assessment of the magnitude, synergies and trade-offs of combined ES and biodiversity. The resulting model parameterizations will be implemented in complex process-based and surrogate models enabling the assessment of long-term development and functioning of salt marshes and their ES under climate change scenarios. These models can inform large scale applications of NbS with salt marshes for climate change adaptation and mitigation.
Funding and collaborators
This project is the NWO-TTW Veni project (20084) from Pim Willemsen. Applied and academic partners are: Deltares, Ecoshape, Wageningen Environmental Research, State Agency for coastal protection – National Park and Marine Conservation Scheswig-Holstein, Wageningen Marine Research, University of Groningen, University of Twente, Leibniz University Hannover, DEME Group, US Army Corps of Engineers, Sun Yat-Sen University.
Output
tbd
Environmental Fluid Mechanics 