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Land–Sea Coupling and Global-Driven Forcing: Following Some of Scott Nixon’s Challenges

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Abstract

Adjoined watershed–estuary–coastal ecosystems are coupled by biogeochemical and hydrodynamic processes, as Scott Nixon repeatedly argued in his many contributions. Case histories from Waquoit Bay and the Pacific Coast of Panama, supplemented by information from other sites, make evident that the couplings that enable connectivity among spatially separate landscape units, while highly subject to detailed local contingencies, take place in every coastal zone, can be powerfully affected by human activities on land, and by global-scale forcings, as Scott Nixon often reminded us. While the factors that determine the details of land–sea coupling differ significantly from one coastal zone to the next, estuarine systems manage, to different degrees, to furnish ecological services not only as filters or transformers of land-derived inputs but also as exporters of energy-rich subsidies to coastal food webs.

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Acknowledgments

The work we review here was supported by several grants from the US National Science Foundation, the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration through Woods Hole Sea Grant and CICEET, the Woods Hole Consortium, and the Ocean Life Institute of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The fieldwork in Panama could not have been done without the excellent resources available at the Liquid Jungle Laboratory. We are much in debt to the many colleagues and assistants that participated in work in Waquoit and Panama. We thank Ken Heck and Paulina Martinetto for thoughtful suggestions on an earlier version of the manuscript.

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  1. The Ecosystems Center, Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA, 02543, USA

    Ivan Valiela & Megan Bartholomew

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  1. Ivan Valiela
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Correspondence to Ivan Valiela.

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Communicated by Wayne S. Gardner

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Valiela, I., Bartholomew, M. Land–Sea Coupling and Global-Driven Forcing: Following Some of Scott Nixon’s Challenges. Estuaries and Coasts 38, 1189–1201 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12237-014-9808-3

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