It is crucial to understand the resilience of coastal wetlands to sea-level rise, saltwater intrusion, and disturbance events to project future ecosystem structure and function. Our research contributes to this understanding by focusing on the processes controlling coastal resilience, state transitions, and disturbance dynamics in coastal wetlands. 

See below for project summaries addressing the overarching themes we're pursuing:
Coastal resilience and state change
Stochastic disturbance events in coastal ecosystems

Coastal resilience and state change

Save Our Swales. This project, funded by NOAA, investigates how saltwater intrusion impacts 'isolated' wetlands along a salinity gradient at the GTMNERR in Northeast FL, USA. We are in the planning stages of this project and are collecting pilot data. 

Sea-Level Rise in Intermittent Estuaries. This project, funded by the CA State Coastal Conservancy, explored how intermittent estuaries respond to sea-level rise differentially than always open estuaries. A conceptual model was published in Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science (Thorne et al. 2021) and a case study manuscript is in prep. 

Alternative Stable States in Salt Marsh. This field experiment tested how chronic flooding stress interacts with disturbance in coastal salt marsh in LA, USA, 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). 

Stochastic disturbance events in coastal ecosystems

​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). 

​Atmospheric River Flooding in SF Bay-Delta. This project, funded by USGS Priority Ecosystem Science, tested how major atmospheric river flooding influenced tidal wetland inundation and sediment dynamics across the northern SF Bay-Delta. The resulting manuscript was published in JGR: Biogeosciences (Thorne et al. 2022).