Salt Marshes: Function, Dynamics, and Stresses

Salt marshes are highly dynamic and important ecosystems that dampen impacts of coastal storms and are an integral part of tidal wetland systems, which sequester half of all global marine carbon. They are now being threatened due to sea-level rise, decreased sediment influx, and human encroachment. This book provides a comprehensive review of the latest salt marsh science, investigating their functions and how they are responding to stresses through formation of salt pannes and pools, headward erosion of tidal creeks, marsh-edge erosion, ice-fracturing, and ice-rafted sedimentation. Written by experts in marsh ecology, coastal geomorphology, wetland biology, estuarine hydrodynamics, and coastal sedimentation, it provides a multidisciplinary summary of recent advancements in our knowledge of salt marshes. The future of wetlands and potential deterioration of salt marshes is also considered, providing a go-to reference for graduate students and researchers studying these coastal systems, as well as marsh managers and restoration scientists.

Duncan FitzGerald is a Professor in the Department of Earth and Environment, Boston University. He is a sedimentologist and coastal geomorphologist, whose work focuses on estuaries and tidal inlet and barrier island dynamics and evolution. During the past 15 years, he's been working on salt marshes and the impact of sea-level rise on these systems. He is a fellow of the Geological Society of America and sits on the board of the Coastal Education and Research Foundation.

Zoe Hughes is a coastal oceanographer and geomorphologist and is an Assistant Research Professor at Boston University, where she has worked since 2004. She began her career looking at tidal inlets and sandy barriers but has since expanded to other coastal systems, including estuarine and marsh systems along the Gulf of Mexico and Eastern Seaboard of the US. Through modeling and field data collection, she researches the interaction of hydrodynamics and sediment transport along coastlines, especially shorelines that incorporate channelized systems such as salt marshes.