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Critical turbidity thresholds for maintenance of estuarine tidal flats worldwide

Nature Geoscience (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Tidal flats are shrinking in extent globally. The dynamics of the response of estuarine tidal flats to global environmental changes remain unclear. Tidal-flat morphology is shaped by the interplay among wave and tidal forces, river discharge and sediment supply, and preservation of tidal flats requires a balance between erosional and depositional processes be maintained. Here we assess tidal-flat morphodynamic changes of 40 globally distributed estuaries with contrasting tidal amplitudes between 1986 and 2011 from analyses of 4,939 satellite images. We consider both vegetated and unvegetated intertidal areas. From comparisons with remote-sensing-derived turbidity estimates, we identify a critical turbidity threshold indicative of a minimum sediment supply along with the hydrodynamic forces, which is necessary to maintain tidal flats. Tidal flats in intertidal areas in estuaries with low turbidity face retreat, with the critical turbidity threshold increasing with increasing tidal amplitudes. By contrast, estuaries with high turbidity tend to exhibit laterally or vertically expanding tidal flats. However, despite estuaries with limited tidal ranges having relatively low turbidity thresholds, environmental or anthropogenic alterations can still adversely affect the morphology of tidal flats. Our findings demonstrate the need to consider sediment supply in integrated estuarine management strategies to maintain the ecological integrity and flood defence function of tidal flats.

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Fig. 1: Spatial distributions of estuaries, environmental characteristics and morphological trajectories.
Fig. 2: Lateral versus vertical changes of the intertidal morphology between 1986–1988 and 2009–2011.
Fig. 3: The CTT to maintain intertidal areas worldwide based on supervised machine-learning techniques.

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Data availability

All datasets used in this study are publicly available. The satellite imagery is freely available via the Google Earth Engine Catalog. The tidal data, including satellite telemetry and gauge data, can be accessed from Worldtides (https://www.worldtides.info/apidocs). The original shapefiles for the presented estuaries can be downloaded from Protected Planet (https://www.protectedplanet.net/) and are archived on Zenodo with respect to the presented study (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8172387)64. Data used for Figs. 1–3, as well as Extended Data Figs. 1, 2 and 5, are provided in Supplementary Table 1. Data used for Extended Data Figs. 3 and 4 are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8172387. The basemap world imagery of Fig. 1 is sourced from Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics and the GIS User Community available at http://goto.arcgisonline.com/maps/World_Imagery.

Code availability

The code was developed in Python version 3.11.0. The code for retrieving digital elevation models per estuary, extracting turbidity concentration, computing the hypsometric integral (Extended Data Fig. 1) and quantifying the dispersion index has been archived and is publicly available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8172387 (ref. 64). This repository also contains the code and data used for validating the modelled intertidal DEMs, as seen in Extended Data Fig. 3.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) (grant PSA-SA-E-02).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Estuarine and Delta Systems, Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), Yerseke, the Netherlands

    Tim J. Grandjean, Roland Weenink, Daphne van der Wal & Tjeerd J. Bouma

  2. Faculty of Geosciences, Department of Physical Geography, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands

    Tim J. Grandjean, Elisabeth A. Addink & Tjeerd J. Bouma

  3. Faculty of Science, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands

    Roland Weenink

  4. Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands

    Daphne van der Wal

  5. School of Marine Sciences, Sun Yat-Sen University and Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai), Zhuhai, China

    Zhan Hu & Shuai Liu

  6. Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Marine Resources and Coastal Engineering, Guangzhou, China

    Zhan Hu

  7. Pearl River Estuary Marine Ecosystem Research Station, Ministry of Education, Zhuhai, China

    Zhan Hu

  8. Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands

    Zheng B. Wang

  9. Deltares, Delft, the Netherlands

    Zheng B. Wang

  10. State Key Laboratory of Estuarine and Coastal Research, Institute of Eco-Chongming, Center for Blue Carbon Science and Technology, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Yuan Lin

  11. Yangtze Delta Estuarine Wetland Ecosystem Observation and Research Station, Shanghai, China

    Yuan Lin

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  1. Tim J. Grandjean
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Contributions

T.J.G. and T.J.B. conceived the idea. T.J.G. and R.W. developed the methodology and performed the analyses of the results. D.v.d.W., E.A.A., Z.H., Z.B.W. and T.J.B. contributed to the methodological improvement in data analysis. T.J.G., R.W., D.v.d.W., E.A.A., Z.H., S.L., Z.B.W., Y.L. and T.J.B. contributed to the paper writing, editing and conceptualization and agreed with the final version.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tim J. Grandjean.

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Nature Geoscience thanks Stuart Phinn and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: Tamara Goldin, in collaboration with the Nature Geoscience team.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Hypsometric curves comparing past and present tidal flat morphologies for 40 estuaries globally.

The hypsometric curves illustrate the tidal flat morphologies for 1986–1988 (past, blue line) and 2009–2011 (present, red line). The lines represent second- or third-order polynomial regressions, fitted through the data points (grey points) for the respective period. The data points are calculated from the generated DEMs and represent the intertidal area (x-axis) above the corresponding elevation (y-axis). All satellite images used to generate the DEM are within the elevation range, called the hypsometric range (as detailed in Extended Data Fig. 3). The vegetated tidal flat (green line), salt marsh or mangrove is part of the analyses and bound to the maximum observed elevation. Some estuaries were partly studied (*) as their extent was too large for the available computational powers. Details regarding the retrieval of this figure can be found in the methodology section ‘Describing morphodynamic developments’ and Extended Data Fig. 3. Details regarding the R2 and the order used for each hypsometric curve can be found in Supplementary Table 1.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Lateral trends in (A) unvegetated tidal flats and (B) vegetated tidal flats as a function of turbidity and tidal range.

The results show a random pattern; there is no predictive trajectory of lateral trends present for the supervised machine learning k-NN classification between retreating (red dots) and expanding (blue dots) lateral trends for either (A) unvegetated tidal flats or (B) vegetated tidal flats. To study morphological trajectories, it appears important to consider both the vegetated and unvegetated intertidal areas in a multi-dimensional aspect (see Fig. 3 of main article).

Extended Data Fig. 3 Example of the retrieval of the hypsometric range from the distribution of Landsat images per three-year bin relative to each other for the Westerschelde estuary (the Netherlands).

The hypsometric curve in this figure was generated using a DEM obtained through a waterline extraction method. The analyses were based on three years of data for each curve and represent the proportion of the tidal basin height in relation to the lowest maximum water level (high-water boundary) and the highest minimum water level (low-water boundary) observed within both periods. It is important to note that the tidal range can exceed the hypsometric range represented by the hypsometric curve. The vegetated tidal flat extent was incorporated in the hypsometric. Vegetated tidal flats are an integral component of an estuary’s intertidal environment; hence, they were incorporated into the tidal basin area at the high-water boundary. The data represented in the right plot is as well used for calculating the dispersion index. Should we observe clustering within a three-year bin, the data points would exhibit skewness. This could occur either on the vertical axis, reflecting the mean sea level, or along the time-oriented x-axis.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Validation results for the modelled intertidal DEMs.

The retrieved DEMs for (A) Oosterschelde and (B) Westerschelde estuaries in the Netherlands were compared with airborne LiDAR data, which was corrected to MSL. The Spearman and Pearson correlation coefficients (rho) and the RMSE were calculated to test the resemblance. In both cases, the Pearson and Spearman correlations were highly significant, with p-values less than 0.001.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Comparison of the modelled tidal and observed hypsometric ranges.

This figure compares each estuary’s average tidal range at a central or nearby tidal station with the hypsometric range observed. The results show a high degree of determination (R2 = 0.84) between the hypsometric and tidal ranges, suggesting that the DEM accurately reflects the extent of the tidal flats. However, a slight discrepancy exists in areas with a higher tidal range (>4 m) due to limitations of the remote sensing data acquisition to capture the full range from low to high water levels.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Table 1

Hypsometric curves comparing past and present tidal-flat morphologies for 40 estuaries globally. The hypsometric curves illustrate the tidal-flat morphologies for 1986–1988 (past, blue line) and 2009–2011 (present, red line). The lines represent second- or third-order polynomial regressions, fitted through the data points (grey points) for the respective period. The data points are calculated from the generated DEMs and represent the intertidal area (x axis) above the corresponding elevation (y axis). All satellite images used to generate the DEM are within the elevation range, called the hypsometric range (as detailed in Extended Data Fig. 3). The vegetated tidal flat (green line), salt marsh or mangrove is part of the analyses and bound to the maximum observed elevation. Some estuaries were partly studied (*) as their extent was too large for the available computational powers. Details regarding the retrieval of this figure can be found in ‘Describing morphodynamic developments’ and Extended Data Fig. 3. Details regarding the R2 and the order used for each hypsometric curve can be found in Supplementary Table 1.

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Grandjean, T.J., Weenink, R., van der Wal, D. et al. Critical turbidity thresholds for maintenance of estuarine tidal flats worldwide. Nat. Geosci. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01431-3

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