Oregon Sea Grant

Extreme water levels generating flooding in estuarine and coastal environments are often driven by compound events, where many individual processes such as waves, storm surge, streamflow, and tides coincide. Despite this, extreme water levels are typically modeled in isolated open coast or estuarine environments, potentially mischaracterizing the true risk of flooding facing coastal communities.

This article and research use the expressed behavior of Coho salmon to evaluate the vulnerability of upriver migrants under future hydrological regimes. The paper discusses management implications and conservation planning.

Authors: Flitcroft, R., Arismendi, I. D., Davis, C., Giannico, G. R., Lewis, S., Penaluna, B., Santelmann, M., Safeeq, M., Snyder, J.

Probabilistic flood hazard assessment is a promising methodology for estuarine risk assessment but currently remains limited by prohibitively long simulation times.

This study addresses this problem through the development of an emulator, or surrogate model, which replaces the simulator (in this case the coupled ADCIRC+SWAN model) with a statistical representation that is able to rapidly predict estuarine variables relevant to flooding.

Community structure and function in ecosystems are dependent on top-down and bottom-up factors, which vary across local, regional, and temporal scales. In estuaries of the U.S. Pacific Northwest coast, eelgrass (Zostera marina) ecosystems are exposed to latitudinally varying oceanographic inputs in the form of ocean upwelling. Previous research suggests that ocean upwelling is critical to eelgrass and ulvoid macroalgae abundance, but the degree to which secondary producers are controlled by processes at regional vs. local scales is unknown.