Submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) and marshes provide ecosystem services, including habitat, wave attenuation, and carbon sequestration. The ability of vegetated estuarine systems to provide ecosystem services, and the extent to which they change in time, depends on many different hydrodynamic, sediment transport, vegetative, and biogeochemical factors.

To improve understanding of these systems, the US Geological Survey’s Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center has implemented a variety of new parameterizations within the Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere-Wave-Sediment Transport model (COAWST; Warner et al., 2010, 2019; see Featured Model in CCMP Newsletter Volume 8, Issue 2). Recent additions to COAWST include accounting for the effect of submerged vegetation on estuarine currents, waves, and turbulence (Beudin et al., 2016; Kalra et al., 2017). Ongoing work also includes accounting for (1) lateral marsh-edge erosion based on wave thrust (Kalra et al., 2018); (2) carbon cycling and marsh plant growth (Moriarty et al., 2018; Kalra et al., 2019); and (3) SAV growth based on water column biogeochemistry and light attenuation (Kalra, pers. comm., 2019).

COAWST is open-source, and available on GitHub (Warner et al., 2019). New developments in COAWST have been, and will continue to be, made available as they are completed.

A time-lapse video of the erosion can be viewed on Youtube.

 

References:

Beudin, A., Kalra, T. S., Ganju, N. K., and Warner, J. C. (2016). Development of a Coupled Wave-Flow-Vegetation Interaction Model, Computers and Geosciences, 100, 76-86.

Kalra, T.S., Aretxabaleta, A. L., Ganju, N.K., Carr, J., and Warner, J.C. (2019). Development of vertical marsh growth dynamics in a 3-D Coupled Wave-Flow-Sediment Transport Model (COAWST). Submitted to the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation Biennial Meeting, 3-7 November 2019, Mobile, AL.

Kalra, T. S., Aretxabaleta, A. L., Seshadri, P., Ganju, N. K., and Beudin, A. (2017). Sensitivity analysis of a coupled hydrodynamic-vegetation model using the effectively subsampled quadratures method (ESQM v5.2). Geoscientific Model Development, 10, 4511–4523.

Kalra, T. S., Moriarty, J. M., Ganju, N. K., and Warner, J. C. (2018). Marsh Erosion Under Wave Action Using a 3-D Coupled Wave-Flow-Sediment Model, Ocean Sciences Meeting, 11-16 Feb. 2018, Portland, OR.

Moriarty, J. M., Kalra, T. S., Ganju, N. K., Defne, Z. (2018). Redistribution of particulate organic carbon following marsh lateral erosion in a back-barrier estuary. AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts.

Warner, J.C., Armstrong, B., He, R., and Zambon, J. (2010). Development of a Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere-Wave-Sediment Transport (COAWST) Modeling System, Ocean Modelling, 35, 230-244.

Warner, J.C., Ganju, N.K., Sherwood, C.R., Kalra, T., Aretxabaleta, A., Olabarrieta, M. (2019). A Coupled Ocean Atmosphere Wave Sediment Transport Numerical Modeling System (COAWST): U.S. Geological Survey software, software accessed 4/19/19 at https://doi.org/10.5066/P9NQUAOW.