Climate-driven tradeoffs between landscape connectivity and the maintenance of the coastal carbon sink.

Ecosystem connectivity tends to increase the resilience and function of ecosystems responding to stressors. Coastal ecosystems sequester disproportionately large amounts of carbon, but rapid exchange of water, nutrients, and sediment makes them vulnerable to sea level rise and coastal erosion. Individual components of the coastal landscape (i.

Retreating marsh shoreline creates hotspots of high-marsh plant diversity.

Marsh edge retreat by wave erosion, an ubiquitous process along estuaries, could affect vegetation dynamics in ways that differ from well-established elevation-driven interactions. Along the marshes of Delaware Bay (USA) we show that species composition from marsh edge to interior is driven by gradients in wave stress, bed elevation, and sediment deposition. At the marsh edge, large wave stress allows only short-statured species.