Anthropocene Coasts最新文献

Coastal environments are subject to trace metal pollution via a combination of industry and urbanised sources. The pollutants accumulate within surface sediments, especially in the quieter backwaters of estuaries. An environmental assessment of the Port Hacking estuary, southern Sydney, Australia, was undertaken using 233 surface samples. Trace metal concentrations (Ni, Cr, Cu, Zn, Pb, and As) in these samples indicated that most elements in Port Hacking were below the relevant ANZECC/ARMCANZ guideline low trigger value (ISQG-low), but a few sites exceeded this value. The low trace metal concentrations are mainly because the catchment areas have limited urban development and few discharge points. In contrast, one site in Gunnamatta Bay has Zn and Cu concentrations that exceeded the high trigger value (ISQG-high), due to moored vessels, boatyards, and stormwater outlets in this vicinity. Port Hacking is considered to be relatively unpolluted and healthy when compared with other Sydney estuaries.

Salt marshes are key coastal ecosystems that provide habitats for wildlife, including invertebrates, fishes, and birds. They provide ecosystem services such as protection from storm surges and waves, attenuation of flooding, sequestration of pollutants (e.g., blue carbon), and nutrient removal. They are currently under great threat from sea level rise (SLR). We collected information about trends in the horizontal extent (acreage) of New Jersey salt marshes and recent elevation changes compared with the current local rate of SLR in New Jersey, which is between 5 and 6 mm year⁻¹. We found pervasive, although variable, rates of marsh loss that resulted from both anthropogenic disturbance as well as edge erosion and interior ponding expected from SLR. Elevation trends suggest that the current rates of SLR exceed most marsh elevation gains, although some Phragmites-dominated marshes keep pace with SLR. Four potential remedies to address current coastal trends of marsh loss were described in the context of New Jersey’s regulatory and management environment: protection of marsh inland migration pathways, altered management of Phragmites, thin layer sediment placement, and living shoreline installations. Proactive steps are necessary if coastal wetland ecosystems are to be maintained over the next few decades.

The massive Qingcaosha Reservoir (QCSR) is located in the Changjiang Estuary along the northwest coast of Changxing Island. The reservoir significantly narrowed the upper reaches of the North Channel and deepened the channel near the reservoir. These topographical changes inevitably influenced hydrodynamic processes and saltwater intrusion in the estuary. A well-validated model was employed to investigate the influence of the QCSR on saltwater intrusion in the Changjiang Estuary. The model results showed that the narrowed upper reaches of the North Channel decreased the water diversion ratio and thus increased salinity in the North Channel. During the moderate tide after neap tide, the salinity decreased at the water intake of the QCSR because saltwater intrusion was obstructed at flood slack at the surface, while the salinity increase during the moderate tide after spring tide was mainly due to the intensified saltwater intrusion during spring tide. The deepening of the channel near the QCSR resulted in an increased water diversion ratio, and the salinity in the Eastern Chongming Shoal decreased by more than 0.5 psu during spring tide; however, the saltwater intrusion was enhanced due to the strengthened baroclinic force, which is proportional to the water depth. During neap tide, the salinity in the entire North Channel decreased because of a 1.4% increase in the water diversion ratio of the North Channel and the relatively weak tide.

The growing push for open data resulted in an abundance of data for coastal researchers, which can lead to problems for individual researchers related to data discoverability. One solution is to explicitly develop services for coastal researchers to help curate data for discovery, hosting discussions around reuse, community building, and finding collaborators. To develop the idea of a coastal data curation service, we investigate aspects of the UNESCO International Coastal Atlas Network member sites that could be used to build a curation service. We develop a minimal example of a coastal data curation service, deploy this as a website, and describe the next steps to move beyond the prototype phase. We envision a coastal data curation service as a way to cultivate a community focused on coastal data discovery and reuse.

In recent decades, international assessments of the ocean have evolved from specialized, technical evaluations of the state of the marine environment to more integrated and thematically extensive science-policy platforms. As assessment programmes such as the UN Regular Process blossom on the global stage and subsume responsibility for tracking progress on sustainable development, there is a need to consider how their processes wield influence and effectively translate knowledge into action. In the present paper, we undertake a comprehensive review of the literature on global environmental assessments (GEAs) and extract key principles that can be applied to global assessments of the marine environment. We were particularly inspired to identify how social processes could be arranged to best distill, communicate, and produce actionable knowledge. While we look to the advice of experts in the literature, we highlight specific examples from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), and the Global Environment Outlook (GEO). From this review, knowledge coproduction, multilevel collaboration, and futures thinking emerged as the dominant principles of influential and action-oriented assessments. We conclude the paper by contextualizing how these principles may be operationalized for Global Marine Assessments in the future.

In the UK, coastal flooding and erosion are two of the primary climate-related hazards to communities, businesses, and infrastructure. To better address the ramifications of those hazards, now and into the future, the UK needs to transform its scattered, fragmented coastal data resources into a systematic, integrated portal for quality-assured, publicly accessible open data. Such a portal would support analyses of coastal risk and resilience by hosting, in addition to data layers for coastal flooding and erosion, a diverse array of spatial datasets for building footprints, infrastructure networks, land use, population, and various socio-economic measures and indicators derived from survey and census data. The portal would facilitate novel combinations of spatial data layers to yield scientifically, societally, and economically beneficial insights into UK coastal systems.

Despite being exceptional concentrations of valuable economic assets, yachts and marinas are typically overlooked in the geography of coastal risk. Focusing on the Mediterranean, which hosts the majority of the world’s yacht activity, we examine three decades of yacht insurance claims in the context of natural hazards and marina development. We find indications that yachts and marinas manifest the same generic relationships between exposure, hazard, and vulnerability observed in terrestrial coastal-risk systems. Given the fundamental importance of yachts and marinas to nautical tourism and strategies for “Blue Economy” growth, particularly in Europe, the role of yachts and marinas in the dynamics of coastal risk must be better understood—but any such insight will first require standardised, comprehensive datasets of yacht movements and marina infrastructure.

Lingding Bay (LDB), on the Pearl River Delta (PRD) of southern China, is a typical example of a large river mouth that is strongly affected by anthropogenic perturbations that have changed the boundary conditions of hydro- and sediment dynamic processes. An analysis of recent sedimentary patterns can shed light on the role of anthropogenic impacts on delta evolution. In this study, we collected surficial sediments from the LDB in December 2016 (dry season) and August 2017 (flood season) to analyze their grain size and organic geochemical compositions, with the aim of investigating recent depositional patterns in the bay and evaluating human impacts. The results reveal two major mud depocenters in the northeastern and southwestern parts of the bay, which are characterized by high values of grain-size end member 1 (EM1) and increased contributions of terrestrial organic carbon in the flood season. We propose that this sedimentary pattern is a manifestation of a system regime shift due to the strengthening of the fluvial function in fluvial-tide interactions and associated changes in the suspended sediment dispersal routine. We suggest that these changes are a result of recently intensified human activities, such as coastal land reclamation and sand mining. Coarsening of the surficial sediments in the LDB in the dry season and a marked increase in the terrestrial organic contribution at the mouth of the LDB indicates the redistribution of fine-grained sediments by waves and currents and increased mud export from the LDB in response to the shallowing of the bay.