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Rates of Vegetation Dynamics Along Elevation Gradients in a Backbarrier Salt Marsh of the Danish Wadden Sea

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Abstract

The literature often holds that, in salt marshes, surface elevation mediates the depth, duration, and frequency of submergence, thereby constituting the fundamental factor of plant species distribution and most other environmental variables. However, such an elevation-centered view has not been fully tested in a temporal sense; it is still unclear whether elevation is also a significant control on the rate of changes in species composition over time. In the Skallingen salt marsh of the Danish Wadden Sea, this question was evaluated along two elevation gradients where distinct physical and ecological processes operate: a gradient across a marsh platform and the other across creek bars. The rate of vegetation dynamics was measured as the Euclidean distance between two positions of the same plot, each representing two different points in time, in a two-dimensional diagram produced by nonmetric multidimensional scaling. Results showed that the rate of vegetation dynamics did not show any significant relationships with surface elevation across either marsh platform or tidal creeks (R 2 less than 0.04). This suggests that, other than elevation, some biological factors, such as the presence of keystone species and the initial species composition, control patterns of vegetation change in the marsh. This logic leads to a point that hydrological effects (e.g., inundation frequency and duration), often represented by surface elevation, are not necessarily overriding factors of rates of changes in species composition in backbarrier marshes like Skallingen. The conventional elevation-centered perspective may be an oversimplification of the biological and environmental variability of salt marshes.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partly supported by the National Science Foundation (BCS-0825753), the European Center of Excellence, the Society of Wetlands Scientists, the Biogeography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers, and the Danish Agency for Science, Technology & Innovation (FNU grant 272-07-0431). The logistical support in the Skallingen field station from Jesper Bartholdy is greatly appreciated. Interpretation of the results has benefited from constructive comments by members of the Biogeomorphology Research and Analysis Group at the University of Kentucky. Ashley DeWitt and Maggie Barr in the University of Kentucky Writing Center provided English editing service. Special thanks are due to Soohyun Jung and William Haeyoung Kim for their inspiration and unending encouragement.

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  1. Biogeomorphology Research and Analysis Group, Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 40506-0027, USA

    Daehyun Kim

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Correspondence to Daehyun Kim.

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Communicated by Scott C. Neubauer

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Kim, D. Rates of Vegetation Dynamics Along Elevation Gradients in a Backbarrier Salt Marsh of the Danish Wadden Sea. Estuaries and Coasts 37, 610–620 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12237-013-9697-x

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