Candidate Presentation

Dr. Erin Peck, Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center, UMass-Amherst

“Insights into centennial-scale salt marsh morphodynamics and blue carbon burial”

ABSTRACT: The coastal zone links terrestrial and marine spheres, thereby playing an integral role in regulating global productivity, elemental cycling, and climate change. At a local level, salt marshes provide often-vulnerable communities with culturally and economically important ecosystem services, including flood protection; filtration of nutrients and pollutants; habitat for flora and fauna including important fisheries species; recreation and tourism; and carbon sequestration. Despite their importance, these systems face imminent threats from rising seas, intensifying storms, shifting hydroclimate, and anthropogenic alterations. I look to the last ~300 y preserved in salt marsh stratigraphy to quantify how changes in the landscape can impact coastal sediment and carbon sinks to inform our fundamental conceptualization of ecogeomorphic systems and characterize socio-ecological vulnerability.