Project Funding: 2017 - 2020

NRA: 2016 NASA: Interdisciplinary Research in Earth Science   

Funded by NASA

Abstract:
Intertwined at the land-water interface, human populations, coastal wetlands and estuaries shape the ecological characteristics of both the coastal terrestrial and aquatic landscape. Yet, these systems have been the focus of research primarily driven by disciplinary objectives and methodologies. As a result, studies of terrestrial and aquatic processes in wetland-estuary systems have remained largely disconnected. Urban development, population shifts and anthropogenic pollution have been shown to affect coastal wetland biodiversity, biogeochemistry, vegetation characteristics and geomorphic stability. The linkages, however, between these human-induced alterations of wetland ecological characteristics and estuarine ecological processes and vulnerability to coastal hazards, remain largely unknown and drive the proposed research. This proposal brings together an interdisciplinary team to address four key science objectives that explicitly link coastal urban landscapes, wetlands and estuaries: (i) Map tidal marsh area extent and plant community composition in a heavily urbanized estuary, assess the status and change in these wetland ecological characteristics over multi-decadal timescales, and examine linkages to coastal population change and associated urban development. This will be useful for assessing both degradation of wetland habitats (e.g., expansion of invasive Phragmites) as well as effectiveness of recent restoration efforts.(ii) Assess how shifts and landscape variability in wetland ecological characteristics (i.e., marsh extent and plant community composition) influence the quantity and quality of nutrients and organic matter exchanged between tidal marshes and adjacent estuarine waters.(iii) Quantify impacts of human-induced alterations in wetland ecological characteristics and wetland-estuarine tidal exchanges on estuarine ecology, specifically addressing estuarine water quality, organic matter cycling, plankton community composition, and linking to development of hypoxic conditions, occurrence of bloom outbreaks and change in fisheries habitat.(iv) Determine potential influences of future natural and anthropogenic pressures on these processes under various environmental and human population change scenarios. We will address these objectives through development of new remote sensing tools for characterization of tidal marsh area extent, vegetation communities and inundation regimes (Sentinel-1 SAR, PALSAR, PALSAR-2, Landsat, Sentinel-2, ASTER), and advanced retrievals of estuarine biological and biogeochemical processes (Sentinel-2, Landsat, HICO, MERIS, MODIS, VIIRS). Remote sensing will be integrated with multi-disciplinary ecological, paleoecological, and socioeconomic datasets, spatial econometric models of population growth, and a novel coupled hydrodynamic-photo-biogeochemical model that we specifically designed for the marsh-estuarine continuum. Human-impacted tidal wetlands are ubiquitous, and results from our study and the developed remote sensing and modeling tools will be broadly applicable to various urban-marsh-estuarine systems. Our 'test-bed' here will be the Long Island Sound, an area that is becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate change but is also representative of many heavily human-impacted estuaries around the globe. Results will provide, for the first time, mechanistic insights into the impacts of long-term changes in wetland ecological characteristics on estuarine biogeochemical and ecological processes, including hypoxia and fisheries habitat. The proposed study directly addresses this solicitation's Subelement 2: 'Ecology at Land/Water Interfaces-Human and Environmental Pressures' and supports NASA's leading role in addressing societal problems through innovative uses of high-quality satellite observations. Stakeholders have expressed interest in working with us to integrate useful feedback from on-the-ground environmental groups into our study and better link science to practice.

Publications:

Cao, F., Tzortziou, M. 2021. Capturing dissolved organic carbon dynamics with Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 in tidally influenced wetland-estuarine systems. Science of The Total Environment. 777, 145910. DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.145910

D'Sa, E. J., Tzortziou, M., Liu, B. 2023. Extreme events and impacts on organic carbon cycles from ocean color remote sensing: Review with case study, challenges, and future directions. Earth-Science Reviews. 243, 104503. DOI: 10.1016/j.earscirev.2023.104503

Lamb, B. T., Tzortziou, M. A., McDonald, K. C. 2021. A Fused Radar-Optical Approach for Mapping Wetlands and Deepwaters of the Mid-Atlantic and Gulf Coast Regions of the United States. Remote Sensing. 13(13), 2495. DOI: 10.3390/rs13132495

Ward, N. D., Megonigal, J. P., Bond-Lamberty, B., Bailey, V. L., Butman, D., Canuel, E. A., Diefenderfer, H., Ganju, N. K., Goni, M. A., Graham, E. B., Hopkinson, C. S., Khangaonkar, T., Langley, J. A., McDowell, N. G., Myers-Pigg, A. N., Neumann, R. B., Osburn, C. L., Price, R. M., Rowland, J., Sengupta, A., Simard, M., Thornton, P. E., Tzortziou, M., Vargas, R., Weisenhorn, P. B., Windham-Myers, L. 2020. Representing the function and sensitivity of coastal interfaces in Earth system models. Nature Communications. 11(1). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-16236-2

More details may be found in the following project profile(s):

• NASA Ocean Biology & Biogeochemistry (OBB) Project Profile