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Kereen T Griffith

In the next 100 years, accelerated sea-level rise (SLR) and urbanization will greatly modify coastal landscapes across the globe. More than one-half of coastal wetlands in the contiguous United States are located along the Gulf of Mexico coast. In addition to supporting fish and wildlife habitat, these highly productive wetlands support many ecosystem goods and services including storm protection, recreation, clean water, and carbon sequestration. Historically, tidal saline wetlands (TSWs) have adapted to sea-level fluctuations through lateral and vertical movement on the landscape. As sea levels rise in the future, some TSWs will adapt and migrate landward in undeveloped low-lying areas where migration corridors...
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MethodsStudy area: Our initial study area included the entire globe. We began with a seamless grid of cells with a resolution of 0.5 degrees (i.e., ~50 km at the equator). Next, we created polylines representing coastlines using SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission) v4.1 global digital elevation model data at a resolution of 250 m (Reuter et al. 2007). We used these coastline polylines to identify and retain cells that intersected the coast. We excluded 192,227 cells that did not intersect the coast. To avoid cells with minimal potential coastal wetland habitat, we used the coastline data to remove an additional 1,056 coastal cells that contained less than or equal to 5% coverage of land. We also removed 176...
In the next 100 years, accelerated sea-level rise (SLR) and urbanization will greatly modify coastal landscapes across the globe. More than one-half of coastal wetlands in the contiguous United States are located along the Gulf of Mexico coast. In addition to supporting fish and wildlife habitat, these highly productive wetlands support many ecosystem goods and services including storm protection, recreation, clean water, and carbon sequestration. Historically, tidal saline wetlands (TSWs) have adapted to sea-level fluctuations through lateral and vertical movement on the landscape. As sea levels rise in the future, some TSWs will adapt and migrate landward in undeveloped low-lying areas where migration corridors...
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Coastal wetland ecosystems are expected to migrate landward in response to accelerated sea-level rise. However, due to differences in topography and coastal urbanization extent, estuaries vary in their ability to accommodate wetland migration. The landward movement of wetlands requires suitable conditions, such as a gradual slope and land free of urban development. Urban barriers can constrain migration and result in wetland loss (coastal squeeze). For future-focused conservation planning purposes, there is a pressing need to quantify and compare the potential for wetland landward movement and coastal squeeze. For 41 estuaries in the northern Gulf of Mexico (i.e., the USA gulf coast), we quantified and compared...
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