A Conterminous United States–Wide Validation of Relative Tidal Elevation Products

Abstract

Recent large-scale spatial products have been developed to assess wetland position in the tidal frame, but nationwide comparisons and validations are missing for these products. Wetland position within the tidal frame is a commonly used characteristic to compare wetlands across biogeomorphic gradients and factors heavily into wetland vulnerability models. We utilize a dataset of 365 surface elevation table stations across the conterminous USA containing ground-surveyed tidal datum and elevation data to validate two gridded, conterminous USA–wide relative tidal elevation products. We identified substantial differences between our ground-surveyed dataset and the gridded products, with the Gulf coast exhibiting the greatest error (p < 0.0001, n = 140). Error in relative tidal elevation products varied by coast, tidal range, and latitude. These differences in errors indicate that gridded relative tidal elevation products may be more accurate in coastal wetlands with larger tidal ranges (> 30 cm) and are less accurate in freshwater wetlands near the coast. This paper makes advances in understanding why relative tidal elevation differences occur among national datasets and identifies areas of future work that could support more robust vulnerability models.