Coastal and ocean planning comprises a broad field of practice. The goals, political processes, and approaches applied to planning initiatives may vary widely. However, all planning processes ultimately require adequate information on both the biophysical and social attributes of a planning region. In coastal and ocean planning practice, there are well-established methods to assess biophysical ...

Estuarine and coastal transformation is as old as civilization yet has dramatically accelerated over the past 150 to 300 years. Reconstructed time lines, causes, and consequences of change in 12 once diverse and productive estuaries and coastal seas worldwide show similar patterns: Human impacts have depleted >90% of formerly important species, destroyed >65% of seagrass and wetland habitat, de...

Simulation of the marine environment has become an important tool across a wide range of human activities, with applications in coastal engineering, offshore industries, fisheries management, marine pollution monitoring, weather forecasting and climate research to name but a few. Hydrodynamic models have been under development for many years and have reached a high level of sophistication. Howe...

'Blue Carbon', which is carbon captured by marine living organisms, has recently been highlighted as a new option for climate change mitigation initiatives. In particular, coastal ecosystems have been recognized as significant carbon stocks because of their high burial rates and long-term sequestration of carbon. However, the direct contribution of Blue Carbon to the uptake of atmospheric CO2 t...

Coastal wetlands offer many important ecosystem services both in natural and in social systems. How to simultaneously decrease the destructive effects flowing from human activities and maintaining the sustainability of regional wetland ecosystems are an important issue for coastal wetlands zones. We use carbon credits as the basis for regional sustainable developing policy-making. With the case...

In recent years, modeling has emerged as an invaluable tool for understanding the functioning of coastal lagoons. Modelling the environmental characteristics of the coastal area near the Bay of Bengal, India has received increasing attention from researchers in the past years. This interest has stimulated a scientific investigation of lagoon ecosystems, which have been studied from the physical...

Major coastal storms, associated with strong winds, high waves and intensified currents, and occasionally with heavy rains and flash floods, are mostly known because of the serious damage they can cause along the shoreline and the threats they pose to navigation. However, there is a profound lack of knowledge on the deep-sea impacts of severe coastal storms. Concurrent measurements of key param...

Empirical relationships between phytoplankton biomass and nutrient concentrations established across a wide range of different ecosystems constitute fundamental quantitative tools for predicting effects of nutrient management plans. Nutrient management plans based on such relationships, mostly established over trends of increasing rather than decreasing nutrient concentrations, assume full reve...

The California Current System is an eastern boundary upwelling system (EBUS) with high biological production along the coast. Oligotrophic offshore waters create cross-shore gradients of biological and physical properties, which are affected by intense mesoscale eddy activity. The influence of eddies on ecosystem dynamics in EBUS is still in debate. To elucidate the mechanisms that influence th...

We thank Yang et al. (1) for their perspective. We are aware of the importance of coastal wetland protection for endangered migratory birds. Our paper in PNAS (2) focuses on the general representation of protected areas for endangered species (e.g., endangered birds) and ecosystem services. Thus, we did not emphasize the representation in nature reserves of coastal wetlands for endangered migra...