Coastal wetlands, such as salt marshes, mangroves, seagrass beds, and tidal flats provide numerous ecosystem services, including coastal protection, biodiversity provision and climate change mitigation. However, coastal wetlands are under pressure from both natural and anthropogenic drivers of coastal change, and shifting climatic boundary conditions, hence are declining in area and habitat quality globally. At the same time, these environments are increasingly in the focus of restoration and nature-based solutions for coastal adaptation, where the aim is to work with, rather than against, the natural processes to build and maintain wetlands. Understanding how sedimentation, vegetation establishment, and self-organisation sustain these systems is therefore essential to designing interventions that remain functional over decadal timescales. This is the case for pristine, natural, managed, and restored systems alike.
This session will bring together studies of coastal wetlands across different climates and geomorphological settings to enhance the understanding of ecosystem service provisioning, interactions between hydrodynamics, sediment, and ecology, and to identify best future management practices and effective nature-based solutions. Studies of all processes occurring within coastal wetlands are invited. This includes, but is not limited to, hydro- and morphodynamics, bio-morphodynamics, bio-geochemistry, ecological change and evolution, and impacts and management implications of climate change, sea level rise, and anthropogenic pressures. We equally invite social science and interdisciplinary contributions, including stakeholder participation and co-design in wetland restoration, governance and institutional arrangements, public perception and acceptance of coastal nature-based solutions, and the distribution of costs, benefits and ecosystem services among coastal communities. This session aims to enhance our understanding of basic processes governing coastal wetland dynamics and to propose sustainable management solutions for contemporary environmental pressures.