Resilience is an emergent property of ecosystems that measures the system’s ability to absorb disturbances without losing function and/or a system’s ability to recover degraded functions after disturbance. Ecosystem resilience is crucial for determining shifts to alternative stable states with disturbance. Coastal ecosystems, such as salt marshes, exist in a dynamic position on the landscape at the edge of vegetation stress tolerance, and experience a wide variety of disturbances depending on climate and geomorphological setting. This makes coastal wetlands excellent systems for investigating stable states, disturbance dynamics, and ecosystem resilience.
As vegetated marshes provide a different suite of functions and services than unvegetated mudflats, it is crucial to understand the resilience of coastal wetlands to sea-level rise and stochastic disturbance events. Our research contributes to this understanding by focusing on the processes controlling state transitions, resistance, and resilience in coastal wetlands. See below for project summaries addressing the overarching questions we're pursuing:
How does sea-level rise interact with other drivers to influence state transitions in coastal wetlands?
How do environmental drivers control coastal wetland response to stochastic disturbance events?
As vegetated marshes provide a different suite of functions and services than unvegetated mudflats, it is crucial to understand the resilience of coastal wetlands to sea-level rise and stochastic disturbance events. Our research contributes to this understanding by focusing on the processes controlling state transitions, resistance, and resilience in coastal wetlands. See below for project summaries addressing the overarching questions we're pursuing:
How does sea-level rise interact with other drivers to influence state transitions in coastal wetlands?
How do environmental drivers control coastal wetland response to stochastic disturbance events?
How does sea-level rise interact with other drivers to influence state transitions in coastal wetlands?
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Sea-level Rise in Intermittent Estuaries. This project, funded by the State Coastal Conservancy, explored how intermittent estuaries respond to sea-level rise differentially than always open estuaries using a modeling approach. A conceptual model was published in Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science (Thorne et al. 2021) and a case study manuscript is in prep (Buffington et al.).
Stress Gradients and State Transitions. This field experiment tested how chronic flooding stress influences salt marsh resilience to top-kill disturbance in coastal Louisiana, and quantified state change using multivariate hypervolumes in a novel framework. The resulting manuscript was published in a resilience special feature in Journal of Ecology (Jones et al. 2021). |
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How do environmental drivers control coastal wetland response to stochastic disturbance events?
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Fire in Suisun Marsh. This project, funded by USGS Priority Ecosystem Science, tested how water management influenced brackish tidal wetland recovery after surface fire disturbance. The resulting manuscript was published in Journal of Environmental Management (Jones et al. 2022).
Storm Flooding Across SF Bay-Delta. This project, funded by USGS Priority Ecosystem Science, tested how major atmospheric river flooding influenced tidal wetland flooding and sediment dynamics across the northern SF Bay-Delta. The resulting manuscript was published in JGR: Biogeosciences (Thorne et al. 2022). |
