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Rapid Land Cover Change in a Submerging Coastal County

  • Marsh Resilience Summit
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Abstract

Sea level rise is reshaping the coasts, allowing coastal habitats such as tidal marshes to migrate inland. To predict where changes will occur, it is critical to understand the factors that influence land cover transition. Here, we test the influence of land cover type on land cover transition. We hypothesized that marsh migration may vary by upland land cover type, due to dominant plant species’ differences in salinity and inundation tolerance. Additionally, the response of people may make specific land cover types more likely to be protected from transition. We measured land cover change in high resolution aerial imagery over the relatively short period of 2009 to 2017 in coastal Somerset County, Maryland. In logistic models of land cover transition, we found that ‘agricultural land’ and ‘scrub shrub wetland / forested wetland’ cover classes were more likely to transition to ‘emergent wetland’ than ‘forest/scrub shrub’ or ‘urban or built-up land’ cover classes, after controlling for elevation and distance to shore, two well-known predictors of marsh migration. Over only 8 years, loss of upland area in the county totaled 6.1 km2, of which 5.7 km2 was agricultural land. This represents a loss of over 2% of the farmland in the county, the majority of which converted to emergent wetland during the study period.

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Acknowledgements

This manuscript was greatly improved by comments from Molly Mitchell, Kate Spidalieri, Lori Staver, Christy Miller, and Taryn Sudol. We are grateful for advice and early work on this project from Elizabeth Schotman and Kelley O’Neal. This work was supported by grants from the USDA Agricultural and Food Research Initiative Competitive Program (#2018-68002-27915) and the Harry Hughes Center for Agroecology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. George Washington University, 800 22nd St. NW, Washington, DC, 20052, USA

    Keryn B. Gedan & Man Qi

  2. Resources for the Future, 1616 P St NW, Washington, DC, 20036, USA

    Rebecca Epanchin-Niell

  3. Key Laboratory of Geographical Process Analysis & Simulation of Hubei Province/College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, 430079, China

    Man Qi

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  1. Keryn B. Gedan
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  2. Rebecca Epanchin-Niell
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  3. Man Qi
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Correspondence to Man Qi.

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Gedan, K.B., Epanchin-Niell, R. & Qi, M. Rapid Land Cover Change in a Submerging Coastal County. Wetlands 40, 1717–1728 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-020-01328-y

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