Marsh migration and beyond: A scalable framework to assess tidal wetland resilience and support strategic management

Abstract

Tidal wetlands are critical but highly threatened ecosystems that provide vital services. Efficient stewardship of tidal wetlands requires robust comparative assessments of different marshes to understand their resilience to stressors, particularly in the face of relative sea level rise. Existing assessment frameworks aim to address tidal marsh resilience, but many are either too localized or too general, and few directly translate resilience evaluations to recommendations for management strategies. In response to the deficiencies in existing frameworks, we identified a set of metrics that influence overall marsh resilience that can be assessed at any spatial scale. We then developed a new comprehensive assessment framework to rank relative marsh resilience using these metrics, which are nested within three categories. We represent resilience as the sum of results across the three metric categories: current condition, adaptive capacity, and vulnerability. Users of this framework can add scores from each category to generate a total resilience score to compare across marshes or take the score from each category and refer to recommended management actions we developed based on expert elicitation for each combination of category results. We then applied the framework across the contiguous United States using publicly available data, and summarized results at multiple spatial scales, from regions to coastal states to National Estuarine Research Reserves to finer scale marsh units, to demonstrate the framework’s value across these scales. Our national analysis allowed for comparison of tidal marsh resilience across geographies, which is valuable for determining where to prioritize management actions for desired future marsh conditions. In combination, the assessment framework and recommended management actions function as a broadly applicable decision-support tool that will enable resource managers to evaluate tidal marshes and select appropriate strategies for conservation, restoration, and other stewardship goals.