We present a methodology to model water, heat, and dissolved oxygen budgets on short time scales within a shallow estuarine environment using limited local water quality and climatic data. A tidally restricted eutrophic pond in Elkhorn Slough, California, experiences extreme diel dissolved oxygen (DO) variations during warm sunny days and neap tidal cycles. Empirical relationships between biolo...

Wetlands present an important opportunity for carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas offsets by virtue of their potential for restoration using known and innovative land management methods, because inherently they are highly productive and accumulate large below-ground stocks of organic carbon. Wetlands are major carbon sinks. While vegetation traps atmospheric CO2 in wetlands and other ecosys...

Cost-effective targeting of conservation activities has only recently been addressed by economists. Most work to date has focused on finding the best locations to set aside land for the protection of biodiversity. An economic approach to the problem, where biodiversity reserve networks are delineated to maximize the number of species protected subject to a budget constraint, has been shown to b...

Coastal wetlands can have exceptionally large carbon (C) stocks and their protection and restoration would constitute an effective mitigation strategy to climate change. Inclusion of coastal ecosystems in mitigation strategies requires quantification of carbon stocks in order to calculate emissions or sequestration through time. In this study, we quantified the ecosystem C stocks of coastal wet...

Coastal wetlands reduce the damaging effects of hurricanes on coastal communities. A regression model using 34 major US hurricanes since 1980 with the natural log of damage per unit gross domestic product in the hurricane swath as the dependent variable and the natural logs of wind speed and wetland area in the swath as the independent variables was highly significant and explained 60% of the v...

The acreage of creation, restoration (re-establishment or rehabilitation), and enhancement that is required by regulatory agencies, including local governments, to compensate for impacts to wetlands is usually greater than the acreage of impact. This difference is expressed as a ratio (a mitigation ratio) of the area required for compensation vs. the area of impact. For example, a ratio of 3:1 ...

Tidal wetland restoration efforts can be challenging to monitor in the field due to unstable local conditions and poor site access. However, understanding how restored systems evolve over time is essential for future management of their ecological benefits, many of which are related to vegetation dynamics. Physical attributes, such as elevation and distance to channel play important roles in go...

Understanding the influence of landscape change on animal populations is critical to inform biodiversity conservation efforts. A particularly important goal is to understand how urban density affects the persistence of animal populations through time, and how these impacts can be mediated by habitat provision; but data on this question are limited for some taxa. Here, we use data from a citizen...

Uncontrolled releases of Tigris and Euphrates River waters after the 2003 war have partially restored some former marsh areas in southern Iraq, but restoration is failing in others because of high soil and water salinities. Nearly 20% of the original 15,000-square-kilometer marsh area was reflooded by March 2004, but the extent of marsh restoration is unknown. High-quality water, nonsaline soil...

Valuing ecosystem services fromwetlands restoration in theMississippi Alluvial Valley W. Aaron Jenkins ⁎, Brian C. Murray , Randall A. Kramer , Stephen P. Faulkner c a Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, Duke University, Box 90335, Durham, NC 27708-0328, USA b Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Box 90328, Durham, NC 27708-0328, USA c U.S. Geological Survey, ...