Beyond waves and shifting sand: considering ecosystem processes in forecasts of coastal landscape change Active

Sea-level rise and storms cause major changes on coastal landscapes, including shifts in elevation, ecosystem type (for example, dunes and tidal wetlands), soils, and plant communities. Because these changes can have impacts on human communities, the local economy, and ecosystems, understanding how, when, and why these changes occur can be important for informing policy and natural resource management decisions. However, much is still unknown in our understanding of and ability to forecast coastal landscape change, and many current modeling approaches do not include important feedbacks between the physical landscape and the species inhabiting it. Examples of these types of feedbacks include the rapid development of dunes as certain types of plants capture windblown sand or the way in which tidal wetlands build in elevation as sea levels rise. Of the many studies on ecosystem response to storms and sea-level rise in the published literature, most have not considered the interconnected coastal ecosystem mosaic where change in one ecosystem cause changes in another. Our Working Group brings together scientists from a variety of disciplines to synthesize what is known about coastal physical and ecological change, to identify early warning signs of impending change for monitoring, and to inform and improve our ability to anticipate future change on coastal barrier islands. The Working Group will use information from published literature, expert opinion, and existing spatial data to answer: (i) What are key landscape characteristics of coastal ecosystems (e.g., elevation, frequency of saltwater inundation)? (ii) What are the processes that allow ecosystems to survive in the face of storms and sea-level rise? (iii) Are there thresholds (e.g., in sea level, storm frequency, inundation rates) that result in changes in ecosystems? (iv) Are there early warning signs of impending ecosystem change that can be detected in remotely sensed imagery? Our overarching hypothesis is that landscape change in coastal systems can be better anticipated when oceanographic, geological, and ecological processes are considered simultaneously.