Fantastic wetlands and why to monitor them: Demonstrating the social and financial benefit potential of methane abatement through salt marsh restoration.

Salt marsh restoration has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions thereby providing an opportunity for blue carbon crediting, but implementation has been limited to date because of insufficient data and validation. In this paper, we demonstrate the potential scale of methane emissions that could be avoided if salinity-reducing impairments are mitigated by applying findings from six salt marsh restoration sites in Massachusetts combined with a previously demonstrated application of the salt marsh salinity-methane relationship. We used calculations of these avoided emissions to estimate the social benefit of salt marsh restoration by calculating avoided costs.

This land is your land, this could be marsh land: Property parcel characteristics of marsh migration corridors in Rhode Island, USA.

Salt marshes, critical habitats offering many ecosystem services, are threatened by development, accelerated sea level rise (SLR) and other anthropogenic stressors that are projected to worsen. As seas rise, some salt marshes can migrate inland if there is adjacent, permeable, undeveloped land available. Facilitating marsh migration is necessary for coastal resilience efforts, but extensive coastal development can make finding suitable migration corridors challenging.

Hazardous and contaminated sites within salt marsh migration corridors in Rhode Island, USA.

As salt marshes attempt to migrate upland due to sea level rise, they will encounter many kinds of land development and infrastructure in highly populated, urbanized coastal communities. Hazardous and contaminated sites (HCSs) -- facilities and infrastructure that store, use, or release harmful substances -- are particularly concerning obstacles to salt marsh migration because of their potential to release contaminants if their structural integrity is compromised. Inventorying HCSs within migration pathways can inform coastal resilience planning.