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Tidal Creek

Started by hachinamio, April 23, 2015, 08:01:38 AM

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hachinamio

Hi everybody,

I have an inquiry about Tidal Creek (Category #18 in SLAMM). I've read the SLAMM technical documentation, but I didn't find any information about the conversion of this category. It doesn't appear in the Table 3 (p. 40), so I don't know which categories it will convert to if eroded or inundated, and is it static?

Thank you.
Chinh

Jonathan S. Clough

For the most part in interpreting SLAMM results we have lumped all saline open water together, despite the three classes included therein --

Estuarine Open Water, Open Ocean, Tidal Creeks,

The definition between Estuarine open water and Open Ocean is largely one of surrounding land masses:  From USFWS "The Estuarine System describes deepwater tidal habitats and adjacent tidal wetlands that are influenced by water runoff from and often semi-enclosed by land. They are located along low-energy coastlines and they have variable salinity."

Certainly some estuarine open water could be converted to open ocean through SLR, but there are some judgement calls required in terms of how much barrier island loss would be required before that occurs.  So we do not convert water in this manner.

In terms of tidal creeks, this is a very rare category and there is no attempt in the model to determine whether it is converted.  There are only 4 NWI categories in our crosswalk that result in tidal creek and they all seem to be obsolete based on the wetland code interpreter:  https://www.fws.gov/wetlands/Data/Wetland-Codes.html   We therefore make no attempt to determine when a tidal creek may then convert to estuarine open water (or riverine tidal?).

The model does predict when inland open water will be breached with salinity, but in terms of other open water categories it's best to assume that the model is not very precise in determining which type of open water category will occur into the future.

hachinamio

Thank you for your reply. So that means Tidal creek wont convert to any categories and it will be stable throughout the simulation, right?

Jonathan S. Clough

Yes.  Tidal Creek is not converted.

hachinamio

Ok. Thank you very much.