The Salt Marshes Can’t Save Us Now
Salt marshes are critical to sea and human life alike, but it’s getting harder for them to survive
The essential barriers between land and sea are starting to drown. Salt marshes — coastal grasslands that are regularly inundated by seawater during high tide — are crucial elements of our ecosystem. They provide a habitat for 75 percent of fish species that are commercially harvested. And because they’re great at absorbing water, they protect coastal communities from flooding. But thanks to the human desire to build homes and cities along coastlines and the fact that sea-level rise is accelerating, coastal salt marshes are under threat.
Anne Giblin is the interim director of the Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. She’s the principal investigator of research at Plum Island, a salt marsh in northern Massachusetts, where she studies nitrogen cycles in the marsh and how the rising sea level affects the overall chemical health of these coastal ecosystems. Though salt marshes aren’t found everywhere — mangroves, which are water-dwelling trees, perform similar functions in the tropics — they are a necessary ecosystem in middle and high latitudes around the world.
