contains digital elevation models in TIFF format for salt marshes surveyed within the Humboldt Bay during the summer of 2012 and the spring of 2013.
Climate change scenarios typically address top-down global to continental scale changes; thus, few are easily interpretable to local land managers or contain vertical resolution that is useful at the local level for developing climate change adaptation strategies. Our studies support a bottom-up local approach to evaluating SLR effects at the parcel scale providing information and data sets useful in assessing responses. We collect comprehensive, detailed site-specific data that are used to model marsh ecological response from SLR and storms. By implementing this approach across sites in Humboldt Bay and along the Pacific coast our results are also relevant at a landscape scale. Our research effort to assess Humboldt Bay NWR marsh response from SLR was divided into two phases. The first phase of the project was to collect baseline data, while the second phase was to model projected marsh ecosystem response to SLR that will be completed in 2014. For the first phase of the study presented in this report, the objectives of the study were to: (1) develop high resolution digital elevation models (DEMs) for the salt marshes, (2) monitor water levels and tidal cycles to assess parcel level inundation patterns and extreme water events, and (3) document the distribution of plants species along the tidal elevation gradient with recognition that recent restoration activities have likely altered distributions of some species.
