Development and implementation of an empirical habitat change model and decision support tool for estuarine ecosystems
Introduction
Estuaries and their associated tidal marshes connect freshwater riverine ecosystems to the open ocean, thereby playing a critical role in supporting marine ecosystem function (McLusky and Elliot, 2004; Beaumont et al., 2007). They supply valuable economic, cultural, and ecological goods and services, including habitat for fish, waterbirds, and mammals (Simenstad and Cordell, 2000; Greenberg et al., 2006; Barbier et al., 2011). Consequently, their preservation is a priority for coastal management. Over the coming century, global sea-level rise (SLR) is expected to diminish the extent of coastal wetlands by as much as 90%, converting productive tidal marshes into subtidal habitat (Nicholls et al., 1999; Galbraith et al., 2002; Craft et al., 2009; Crosby et al., 2016). Shoreline armoring, levees, and dams further compound the threat of SLR by removing many estuaries from tidal influence, preventing them from migrating inland, and reducing sediment accretion (Kirwan and Murray, 2008; Jackson, 2010). Major efforts are underway to eliminate unnecessary barriers to tidal exchange, but restored estuaries are often subject to degradation, which can reduce their resilience to SLR and other natural hazards (Callaway et al., 2007; Vandenbruwaene et al., 2011).
Historically, estuarine tidal marshes have been able to counter the effects of SLR via an ecomorphodynamic feedback cycle whereby tidal inundation, vegetative growth, and sediment accumulation allow the marsh plain to keep pace with gradually increasing tidal levels (Kirwan et al., 2010; French, 2006; Fitzgerald et al., 2008). Specifically, marsh vegetation traps suspended sediment and slows the flow of water across the marsh surface, thereby facilitating sediment deposition and accretion (D’Alpaos et al., 2007, 2011). Habitat degradation due to disturbance, development, or management actions may inhibit this feedback cycle by facilitating erosion, hindering sediment delivery, or limiting above and belowground productivity (Syvitski et al., 2009; Vandenbruwaene et al., 2011; Burdick and Roman, 2012). Practitioners can augment the capacity of at-risk tidal marshes to respond to disturbance (i.e., their resilience) through the physical modification of sedimentation and subsidence rates, but there are often ecological, physical, or demographic limitations to the continued stability of estuarine habitat (Kirwan and Megonigal, 2013). Given these limitations, practitioners may benefit from a decision support tool that uses empirical data to identify vulnerable areas in a restored or degraded estuary, predicts changes to the estuarine habitat mosaic, and simulates the effects of alternative management scenarios given projected estimates of SLR.
Marsh accretion models can be used as decision support tools to help managers determine a target estuary’s long-term resilience. There is considerable breadth in the type and utility of marsh accretion models (Rybczyk and Callaway, 2009; Mcleod et al., 2010), ranging from generalized numerical equations and simplified inundation simulations (Titus and Richman, 2001; Kirwan et al., 2010), to spatially explicit, process-based models (Schile et al., 2014; Morris et al., 2016; Thorne et al., 2018). At present, tradeoffs between accuracy and simplicity have opened a niche for habitat change models that combine a transparent numerical foundation with localized, empirical data such as that commonly collected in wetland monitoring programs. A similar approach has already been used to predict water temperature (Morrill et al., 2005; Sharma et al., 2008), phytoplankton productivity (Joint and Groom, 2000; Barnes et al., 2011), marsh vegetation (Sanderson et al., 2001), tidal channel formation (Hibma et al., 2004), and organic and inorganic sediment accretion (Swanson et al., 2014; Morris et al., 2016) in a variety of freshwater and marine ecosystems. Thus, there is reason to believe that the combined use of existing monitoring datasets with numerical models may also be suitable for predicting estuarine habitat response to SLR.
This study evaluates the effects of rising tidal levels and modified sediment management strategies on estuarine habitat by developing a Monitoring-based Simulation of Accretion in Coastal Estuaries (MOSAICS). We calibrated and tested MOSAICS in R statistical software (R Core Development Team, 2017) using seven years of post-restoration monitoring data from the Nisqually River Delta (NRD) in southern Puget Sound, Washington, USA (Ellings et al, 2016; Woo et al., 2018). The NRD is a macro-tidal system comprised of a diverse habitat mosaic of upland tidal forests, freshwater, brackish, and saline emergent marshes, and intertidal mudflats. These attributes make it an ideal case study to evaluate habitat resilience to SLR and resultant changes in habitat distribution among historically managed and unaltered (relict) areas. Restoration actions conducted between 1996 and 2009 were led by Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge (hereafter “Refuge”) and the Nisqually Indian Tribe (hereafter “Tribe”). The restored marshes have provided ample foraging and roosting sites for economically-valuable waterbirds and crucial nursery habitat for juvenile Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha; Ellings et al., 2016; Davis et al., 2018; Woo et al., 2018) listed under the Endangered Species Act. As such, state, federal, and tribal managers have a vested interest in maintaining the current extent of wetland habitat over the coming century.
Here we describe our steps in constructing, validating, and evaluating MOSAICS, which we used to evaluate long-term habitat trajectories in a subsided restoration area, a higher elevation restoration area, and a relict tidal marsh. Our overarching objectives for this study were: 1) develop an empirical model to project long-term trajectories of elevation change and habitat distribution; 2) manipulate tidal level and sediment input parameters to determine how management scenarios may influence the estuarine habitat mosaic under impending SLR; and 3) compare estimated changes in the habitat mosaic for restored and relict sites. We anticipated that subsided restoration areas would exhibit less resilience to rising sea levels than the relict marsh due to lower initial elevations and a lack of vegetative biomass (Morris et al., 2002). Our approach demonstrates how monitoring data can play a crucial role in modeling efforts and can be used as part of a decision support tool to gauge the resilience of restored estuaries in the face of climate change.
Section snippets
Study site
The Nisqually River originates from glacial discharge at the southwestern base of Mount Rainier, Washington, USA. From there the river meanders 130 km northward, where it empties into Puget Sound between the cities of Olympia and Tacoma (47.08 °N 122.70 °W), forming a large river delta with an areal extent of approximately 20 km2. Between 1904 and 2009, roughly 5 km2 of the delta’s marshes were diked or leveed for agriculture, resulting in habitat loss for a variety of fish and wildlife
Model structure and validation
We successfully parameterized each hierarchical component of MOSAICS (I, S, V, ΔE) using the empirical datasets (Table 1, Table 2). Model RMSE was less than 16% of the range of observed values for each component (Table 3). For ΔE, the parameters rb in the sediment capture equation (Ecap) and va in the organic matter deposition equation (Eorg) converged on zero, so they were omitted from the final model. This meant that Eorg essentially had no effect on elevation change in the NRD (contrary to
Discussion
Our study effectively demonstrates how empirical monitoring data can be used as part of a decision support tool to forecast differences in the long-term resilience of restored and relict estuaries when confronted with SLR. We evaluated the relative effects of alternative sediment management scenarios on the persistence and composition of estuarine habitats using a hierarchical numerical model (MOSAICS). Model predictions indicated that post-restoration marsh accretion in the NRD is occurring at
Conclusion
Empirically-based decision support tools that allow for multiple climate change and management scenarios are important for restoration planning, especially given the threat of global SLR. Managers rarely have the opportunity to manipulate suspended sediment inputs on a whole-estuary scale (Thom, 2000; Teal and Weishar, 2005; Callaway et al., 2007); however, adaptive reservoir management options to increase sediment delivery to sediment-deficient river deltas may help ameliorate the effects of
Uncited-references
Rogers et al. (2012).
Funding
This research was funded by EPA Tribal Assistant Grant no. PA-00J15001, the Estuary and Salmon Restoration Program (Project #13-1583P), USGS/USFWS Science Support Program, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, USGS Biologic Carbon Sequestration Program, USGS Ecosystem Mission Area, USFWS Coastal Program, and WERC program funds. Author M. Davis was partially supported by an American Dissertation Fellowship through the American Association of University Women.
Data accessibility
Water logger data are available at: https://doi.org/10.5066/F7SJ1HNC (Thorne, 2015). Vegetation biomass data can be found at https://doi.org/10.5066/F77943K8 (Byrd et al., 2017). R code and R Markdown documents outlining the model building and calibration process will be available on https://github.com/USGS-R.
Declaration of Competing Interest
None.
Acknowledgments
This research was made possible through cooperation between the U.S. Geological Survey Western Ecological Research Center (USGS WERC), Nisqually Indian Tribe, Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, and the Nisqually River Foundation. Numerous USGS employees contributed to more than seven years of data collection, including J.Y. Takekawa, L. Shakeri, S. Blakely, A. Munguia, K. Turner, L. Belleveau, P. Markos, S. Kaviar, M. Holt, H. Minella, H. Allgood, A. Goodman, C. Freeman, G.
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