| Understanding salt marsh ecosystems is crucial because marsh plants create unique and productive wetland habitat in temperate estuaries for a variety of economically valuable and ecologically important fishes, birds, and invertebrates. In addition to creating habitat, salt marshes provide key ecosystem services by removing excess nutrients from terrestrial run-off, buffering shorelines from storm erosion, and sequestering atmospheric carbon. In the Merrimack River-Plum Island estuarine system just north of Boston, some salt marshes can receive copious amounts of allochthonous inputs in the form of marsh plant detritus (i.e., large mats of “wrack”), while other salt marshes do not. This project will use aerial imagery, drones, and AI to quantify whether wrack accumulates into hierarchically organized hot spots according to predictions based on the oceanography of the system. Outdoor field and laboratory experiments will then be conducted to determine whether the oceanographically-generated landscape patterns of wrack set the pace for food web dynamics in this critical ecosystem. This project is funded by the National Science Foundation. |