Coastal wetlands mitigate storm flooding and associated costs in estuaries

As storm-driven coastal flooding increases under climate change, wetlands such as saltmarshes are held as a nature-based solution. Yet evidence supporting wetlands' storm protection role in estuaries—where both waves and upstream surge drive coastal flooding—remains scarce. Here we address this gap using numerical hydrodynamic models within eight contextually diverse estuaries, simulating storms of varying intensity and coupling flood predictions to damage valuation. Saltmarshes reduced flooding across all studied estuaries and particularly for the largest—100 year—storms, for which they mitigated average flood extents by 35% and damages by 37% ($8.4 M). Across all storm scenarios, wetlands delivered mean annual damage savings of$2.7 M per estuary, exceeding annualised values of better studied wetland services such as carbon storage. Spatial decomposition of processes revealed flood mitigation arose from both localised wave attenuation and estuary-scale surge attenuation, with the latter process dominating: mean flood reductions were 17% in the sheltered top third of estuaries, compared to 8% near wave-exposed estuary mouths. Saltmarshes therefore play a generalised role in mitigating storm flooding and associated costs in estuaries via multi-scale processes. Ecosystem service modelling must integrate processes operating across scales or risk grossly underestimating the value of nature-based solutions to the growing threat of storm-driven coastal flooding

Multiple trait dimensions mediate stress gradient effects on plant biomass allocation, with implications for coastal ecosystem services

The plant economic spectrum (PES) predicts a suite of correlated traits in a continuum from resource conservation to rapid resource acquisition. In addition to competing for resources, plants need to cope with other environmental stresses to persist and reproduce. Yet, it is unclear how multiple strategies (i.e. traits uncorrelated with the PES) affect plant biomass allocation, hindering our ability to connect environmental gradients to ecosystem services.We examined intraspecific dimensionality of leaf and root traits in the salt marsh pioneer species Spartina anglica across salinity, redox and sand content gradients, and related them to above-ground and below-ground plant biomass—properties associated with wave attenuation and sediment stabilization in coastal marshes.Through principal component analysis, we did not find support for a single PES trait dimension (strategy), but instead identified four trait dimensions: (a) leaf economic spectrum (LES, leaf analogue of PES); (b) fine roots-rhizomes; (c) coarse roots; and (d) salt extrusion. Structural equation modelling showed a shift towards the conservative side of the LES under increasing salinity, while redox had a positive influence on the coarse roots dimension. In turn, these trait dimensions were strongly associated with above-ground and below-ground biomass (BLW biomass) allocation.These results indicate that under high salinity, plants will adopt a conservative strategy and will invest more in BLW biomass. Yet, high sediment redox would still allow plants to invest in above-ground biomass. Therefore, plants' trait-mediated biomass allocation depends on the specific combination of abiotic factors experienced at the local scale.Synthesis. Our study highlights the importance of considering multiple ecological strategies for understanding the effect of the environment on plants. Abiotic stresses can influence multiple trait strategy-dimensions, with consequences for ecosystem functioning

Ambient-aware continuous care through semantic context dissemination

Background: The ultimate ambient-intelligent care room contains numerous sensors and devices to monitor the patient, sense and adjust the environment and support the staff. This sensor-based approach results in a large amount of data, which can be processed by current and future applications, e. g., task management and alerting systems. Today, nurses are responsible for coordinating all these applications and supplied information, which reduces the added value and slows down the adoption rate. The aim of the presented research is the design of a pervasive and scalable framework that is able to optimize continuous care processes by intelligently reasoning on the large amount of heterogeneous care data. Methods: The developed Ontology-based Care Platform (OCarePlatform) consists of modular components that perform a specific reasoning task. Consequently, they can easily be replicated and distributed. Complex reasoning is achieved by combining the results of different components. To ensure that the components only receive information, which is of interest to them at that time, they are able to dynamically generate and register filter rules with a Semantic Communication Bus (SCB). This SCB semantically filters all the heterogeneous care data according to the registered rules by using a continuous care ontology. The SCB can be distributed and a cache can be employed to ensure scalability. Results: A prototype implementation is presented consisting of a new-generation nurse call system supported by a localization and a home automation component. The amount of data that is filtered and the performance of the SCB are evaluated by testing the prototype in a living lab. The delay introduced by processing the filter rules is negligible when 10 or fewer rules are registered. Conclusions: The OCarePlatform allows disseminating relevant care data for the different applications and additionally supports composing complex applications from a set of smaller independent components. This way, the platform significantly reduces the amount of information that needs to be processed by the nurses. The delay resulting from processing the filter rules is linear in the amount of rules. Distributed deployment of the SCB and using a cache allows further improvement of these performance results

Organic carbon stocks of Great British saltmarshes

Coastal wetlands, such as saltmarshes, are globally widespread and highly effective at capturing and storing ‘blue carbon’ and have the potential to regulate climate over varying timescales. Yet only Australia and the United States of America have national inventories of organic carbon held within saltmarsh habitats, hindering the development of policies and management strategies to protect and preserve these organic carbon stores. Here we couple a new observational dataset with 4,797 samples from 26 saltmarshes across Great Britain to spatially model organic carbon stored in the soil and the above and belowground biomass of Great British saltmarshes. Using average values derived from the 26 marshes, we deliver first-order estimates of organic carbon stocks across Great Britain’s 448 saltmarshes (451.66 km2). The saltmarshes of Great Britain contain 5.20 ± 0.65 Mt of organic carbon, 93% of which is in the soil. On average, the saltmarshes store 11.55 ± 1.56 kg C m-2 with values ranging between 2.24 kg C m-2 and 40.51 kg C m-2 depending on interlinked factors such as geomorphology, organic carbon source, sediment type (mud vs sand), sediment supply, and relative sea level history. These findings affirm that saltmarshes represent the largest intertidal blue carbon store in Great Britain, yet remain an unaccounted for component of the United Kingdom’s natural carbon stores

Comparison of three nudge interventions (priming, default option, and perceived variety) to promote vegetable consumption in a self-service buffet setting.

BACKGROUND: Dietary choices in out-of-home eating are key for individual as well as for public health. These dietary choices are caused by a wide array of determinants, one of which is automatic decision-making. Nudging is attracting considerable interest due to its understanding and application of heuristic biases among consumers. The aim of this study is to test and compare three nudges in promoting vegetable consumption among test persons in a food lab-based experiment. METHODS: The initial sample consisted of 88 participants recruited in Copenhagen, Denmark. Each study participant was randomly assigned to one of the three experiments: priming, default and perceived variety. The priming arm of the experiment consisted of creating a leafy environment with green plants and an odour of herbs. In the default arm of the experiment, the salad was pre-portioned into a bowl containing 200g of vegetables. The third experiment divided the pre-mixed salad into each of its components, to increase the visual variety of vegetables, yet not providing an actual increase in items. Each individual was partaking twice thus serving as her/his own control, randomly assigned to start with control or experimental setting. RESULTS: The default experiment successfully increased the energy intake from vegetables among the study participants (124 kcal vs. 90 kcal in control, p<0.01). Both the priming condition and perceived variety reduced the total energy intake among the study participants (169 kcal, p<0.01 and 124 kcal, p<0.01, respectively), mainly through a decrease in the meat-based meal component. CONCLUSIONS: Considerable progress has been made with regard to understanding the use of nudging in promoting a healthier meal composition, including increasing vegetable intake. This study suggests that the nature of a nudge-based intervention can have different effects, whether it is increasing intake of healthy components, or limiting intake of unhealthy meal components. This work has demonstrated that consumer behaviour can be influenced without restricting or providing incentives for behaviour change. The present findings have promising application to the foodservice sector