The maintenance of soil surface elevation in mangroves supports the persistence of mangroves with sea level rise. The processes contributing to soil surface elevation have rarely been assessed in the humid tropics, despite most mangroves occurring in river deltas and tidal estuaries within this climate zone. Using surface elevation table (SET) with marker horizon methods over sites that occurred on either the main river channe...

Wave attenuation by natural coastal features is recognised as a soft engineering approach to shoreline protection from storm surges and destructive waves. The effectiveness of wave energy dissipation is determined, in part, by vegetation structure, extent, and distribution. Mangroves line ca. 15% of the world’s coastlines, primarily in tropical and subtropical regions but also extending into temperate climates, where mangroves...

Mangrove forests in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are facing multiple threats from natural and anthropogenic-driven land use change stressors, contributing to altered ecosystem conditions. Remote sensing tools can be used to monitor mangroves, measure mangrove forest-and-tree-level attributes and vegetation indices at different spatial and temporal scales that allow a detailed and comprehensive understanding of...

The promotion of sedimentation by mangrove ecosystems with adequate sediment supply has been well documented. However, predicting the amount of accretion or erosion at a specific point, is difficult due to the inherent stochasticity of sediment movement and deposition. Forcings which have been thought to influence short-term sedimentation rates, such as the amount of suspended matter in the incoming water, the wave regime at t...

Arid zone coastal wetlands provide disproportionally important ecosystem services due to their relatively high levels of productivity relative to adjacent terrestrial systems. However, these wetlands are vulnerable to sea level rise as sediments needed for vertical accretion are limited. In order to assess the processes important for vertical accretion in arid zone coastal wetlands, we assessed vertical accretion across an ari...

Macroalgae are important components on coral reefs that underpin food webs but are also indicators of declines in coral reef condition. The sensitivity of macroalgal communities to environmental factors, including climate and pollutants from the land, is important for the future state of coral reefs. We assessed regional variation in the photosynthetic physiology of macroalgae on the Great Barrier Reef and Moreton Bay, Queensl...

Aim Global warming and eutrophication are major threats to coastal environments worldwide. As a result of differences between temperate and tropical ecosystems in nutrient availability, nitrogen (N):phosphorus (P) coupling and carbon retention, primary productivity and biotic interactions in the tropics are predicted to have stronger responses to increased nutrients than in temperate ecosystems. Habitats that occur across broa...

Seagrasses sequester globally significant amounts of carbon (C), which is stored mainly in the sediment. Both C fixation by the seagrass (autochthonous) and the trapping of organic matter that is derived from outside the ecosystem (allochthonous) contribute to seagrass sediment organic C (OC). However, due to limitations in current methods we do not yet fully understand which sources of C are most important to blue C ecosystem...

Salt marshes can play a vital role in mitigating the effects of global environmental change by dissipating incident storm wave energy and, through accretion, tracking increasing water depths consequent upon sea level rise. Atmospheric CO 2 concentrations and nutrient availability are two key variables that can affect the biological processes that contribute to marsh surface elevation gain. We measured the effects of CO 2 conce...