In an era of change, the survival and adaptability of ecosystems will be tested. An optimal ecosystem would be both resistant and resilient to negative disturbance but also efficient and redundant in its growth when given positive subsidies. However, initial evidence has suggested that these properties cannot all be maximized at the same time, and so we sought to quantitatively assess whether there are fundamental trade‐offs b...

When droughts occur, freshwater inputs to coastal wetlands can become scarce and hypersalinity can become a problem. In 2023, a severe drought negatively affected a Texas watershed known as Lake Austin that fed a large expanse of wetlands on East Matagorda Bay. To study the hypersalinity problem in these wetlands, we identified freshwater inflows and mapped vegetation changes over time. We found that from 1943 to 2023, the upp...

Bays and estuaries rely on freshwater inflows to maintain the salinity gradient necessary to sustain their fisheries. Reduced freshwater inflows, particularly during summer seasons, can be detrimental to the health of these systems. Despite an extensive network of streamflow gauges in the U.S., many coastal watersheds remain ungauged. The primary objective of this study was to develop methods to build a water budget for an ung...

Coastal dune restoration projects are increasingly seen as a means of protecting the coast against storms, especially with the use of natural (plants), artificial (geotextile tube cores) and hybrid (plants and geotextile tube) elements. As geotextile tube cores have been found to negatively affect dune and beach natural morphodynamics, rocky cores are thus seen as a potential alternative. We carried out laboratory experiments...

There has been a growing interest in research on how to define and build indicators of resilience to address challenges associated with sea-level rise. Most of the proposed methods rely on lagging indicators constructed based on the historical performance of an infrastructure sub-system. These indicators are traditionally utilized to build curves that describe the past response of the sub-system to stressors; these curves are...

Tidal wetlands contain large reservoirs of carbon in their soils and can sequester carbon dioxide ( CO 2 ) at a greater rate per unit area than nearly any other ecosystem. The spatial distribution of this carbon influences climate and wetland policy. To assist with international accords such as the Paris Climate Agreement, national‐level assessments such as the United States (U.S.) National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, and region...