Salt marshes are valuable ecosystems that provide important ecosystem services. Given the global scale of marsh loss due to climate change and coastal squeeze, there is a pressing need to identify the critical extrinsic (wind exposure and foreshore morphology) and intrinsic factors (soil and vegetation properties) affecting the erosion of salt marsh edges. In this study, we quantified rates of cliff lateral retreat (i.e., the eroding edge of a salt marsh plateau) using a time series of aerial photographs taken over four salt marsh sites in the Westerschelde estuary, the Netherlands. In addition, we experimentally quantified the erodibility of sediment cores collected from the marsh edge of these four marshes using wave tanks. Our results revealed the following: (i) at the large scale, wind exposure and the presence of pioneer vegetation in front of the cliff were the key factors governing cliff retreat rates; (ii) at the intermediate scale, foreshore morphology was partially related to cliff retreat; (iii) at the local scale, the erodibility of the sediment itself at the marsh edge played a large role in determining the cliff retreat rate; and (iv) at the mesocosm scale, cliff erodibility was determined by soil properties and belowground root biomass. Thus, both extrinsic and intrinsic factors determined the fate of the salt marsh but at different scales. Our study highlights the importance of understanding the scale dependence of the factors driving the evolution of salt marsh landscapes.@en

Tidal flats provide valuable ecosystem services such as flood protection and carbon sequestration. Erosion and accretion processes govern the ecogeomorphic evolution of intertidal ecosystems (marshes and bare flats) and, hence, substantially affect their valuable ecosystem services. To understand the intertidal ecosystem development, high-frequency bed-level change data are thus needed. However, such datasets are scarce due to the lack of suitable methods that do not involve excessive labour and/or costly instruments. By applying newly developed surface elevation dynamics (SED) sensors, we obtained unique high-resolution daily bed-level change datasets in the period 2013-2017 from 10 marsh-mudflat sites situated in the Netherlands, Belgium, and the United Kingdom in contrasting physical and biological settings. At each site, multiple sensors were deployed for 9-20 months to ensure sufficient spatial and temporal coverage of highly variable bed-level change processes. The bed-level change data are provided with synchronized hydrodynamic data, i.e. water level, wave height, tidal current velocity, medium sediment grain size (D50), and chlorophyll a level at four sites. This dataset has revealed diverse spatial morphodynamics patterns over daily to seasonal scales, which are valuable to theoretical and model development. On the daily scale, this dataset is particularly instructive, as it includes a number of storm events, the response to which can be detected in the bed-level change observations. Such data are rare but useful to study tidal flat response to highly energetic conditions. The dataset is available from 4TU.ResearchData (https://doi.org/10.4121/12693254.v4; Hu et al., 2020), which is expected to expand with additional SED sensor data from ongoing and planned surveys.@en