Coastal Systems

35

Restoring marine, coastal and estuary ecosystems for a sustainable future

Nathan Waltham¹, Katherine Dafforn², Ana Bugnot³

¹James Cook University, Townsville, Australia. ²Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. ³University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia. ³CSIRO, Brisbane, Australia

Summary

Human activities in marine areas continue to compromise coastal and estuarine ecosystems.  Urban, industrial and agricultural activities contribute to poor water quality, altered freshwater flows, chemical pollution, loss of habitat, light pollution, invasive species, sedimentation/eutrophication – the list goes on.  Although these impacts have been widely studied, the evidence base for successful repair and restoration remains small, nor have strategies been developed at a large enough scale to support whole of ecosystem improvement.  This session brings together coastal and green engineering scientists, restoration practitioners, managers, NRM and NGO sectors to showcase success, share learnings and major outcomes in coastal ecosystem restoration and eco-engineering.  This session has a solutions focus which is particularly necessary in building a sustainable future.  

40

Mathematical and statistical modeling of the impacts of catastrophic events on environmental and marine habitats

Alexey Sadovski, Maria Vasilyeva

Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, Corpus Christi, USA

Summary

This symposium/working group will be dealing with the modeling and study of the impact of catastrophic events such as hurricanes on the destruction and restoration of different habitats including multi-species marine habitats in the Gulf of Mexico. The discoveries are expected to be extended to other areas susceptible to catastrophic events.

41

The impact of future hydrological changes on estuarine and marine systems

Jodie Schlaefer¹, Ulrike Bende-Michl², Mark Baird¹, Urooj Khan³, Clothilde Langlais¹, Richard Laugesen³, Mathieu Mongin¹, Wendy Sharples²

¹The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Hobart, Australia. ²The Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, Australia. ³The Bureau of Meteorology, Canberra, Australia

Summary

Catchments are being impacted by climate change, where shifts in the distributions of processes such as precipitation and evaporation, and associated changes in land use patterns, have been projected to alter the hydrological cycle. In turn, these changes could impact river-specific streamflow regimes, and the generation and transport of riverine sediments and nutrients. Ultimately, these rivers run into estuaries and coastal waters, so future changes to riverine inputs could represent an additional stressor to these systems. However, it is inherently difficult to link changes in the atmosphere to flow-on stressors, as these problems encompass a multidisciplinary earth-system-modelling approach. We invite talks from the catchment and coastal ecosystem modelling communities that consider how alterations to the hydrological cycle may impact estuarine and marine systems.

59

Comparison between intertidal invertebrate communities in rocky shores under human intervention or conservation

Patricio De los Ríos-Escalante¹, Fatima Kies²

¹Universidad Católica de Temuco, Temuco, Chile. ²University of Milano-Bicocca, Lombardy, Italy, Milan, Italy

Summary

The human intervention or protection procedures can have important consecuences on intertidal invertebrate communities, and it is possible found marked decreasing in diversity under strong human intervention, or increasing diversity if there is protection procedures. The present symposium will expose different observations on rocky littoral marine environments with the aim of compare situations of protection or human intervention, and the potential effects on invertebrate species richness and individual abundances.

72

Providing solutions to a current environmental problem facing our changing world: Improving methods and models used to measure and scale evapotranspiration (ET) to the landscape scale in urban regions, catchments and wetlands

Pamela Nagler¹, Hamideh Nouri², Huade Guan³, Genxu Wang⁴

¹U.S. Geological Survey, Tucson, USA. ²Government of South Australia, Department for Environment and Water, Strategy, Science and Corporate Services, Science and Information Branch, Adelaide, Australia. ³Flinders University, National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training (NCGRT), College of Science & Engineering, Adelaide, Australia. ⁴Chinese Academy of Sciences of Sciences, Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environments, Chengdu, China

Summary

We wish to build a sustainable and desirable future by providing solutions to a current environmental problem facing our changing world. Ensuring long-term water sustainability for increasing human populations is a common goal for water resource managers. There have been recent advances in the quantification of evapotranspiration (ET), a major part of the hydrological cycle and whose value is of great importance for the health of humans and the environment. We are interested in methods, measurements and models of ET in catchments, wetlands and urban regions. There have been many recent advances in computing accurate ET for both point and landscape scales. These support hydrological applications and riparian and agricultural water management. Accurate ET calculation depends on the success of quantifying evaporation from the soil surface and transpiration from vegetation; this is challenging for many operational ET algorithms. There is a lack of operational physical-based surface energy and water balance models in high temporal and spatial resolution that incorporates weather variability, precipitation, irrigation, green leaf area, phenology patterns, including senescence, rooting depth, atmosphere and stomatal resistances, surface roughness and moisture. ET measurements are often made on local scales; yet, scaling to regional resolution has been problematic due to spatial and temporal variability. We invite presentations that contribute theoretical and empirical ET model applications and studies that estimate ET using both prognostic and diagnostic approaches from process-based models that rely on the integration of precipitation and soil-vegetation dynamics to a more direct estimation of ET using remote sensing- based data streams.