Dr. Scott F. Jones, an assistant professor of biology on the College of North Florida, has co-led a not too long ago revealed analysis undertaking with a world workforce of scientists that presents a unified conceptual framework for learning salt marshes. This undertaking goals to foster cross-disciplinary and world collaborations, providing a extra complete understanding of salt marsh ecosystem capabilities by way of a well-defined scientific strategy.

Salt marshes play an important function in connecting land and sea worldwide. They supply important safety to coastal communities towards the devastating impacts of storm surges, assist cut back nitrogen ranges and retailer carbon, thus mitigating the consequences of local weather change. Moreover, they function essential habitats for various fish and plant species.

Regardless of the varied and distinctive nature of those transitional ecosystems, they’re typically studied as if all salt marshes are equivalent. This collaborative analysis undertaking has introduced collectively scientists from all over the world to develop a conceptual framework that allows extra rigorous and equitable comparisons of salt marshes.

The undertaking’s co-leads, Dr. Erik S. Yando from Previous Dominion College and Dr. W. Ryan James from Florida Worldwide College, have spent a number of years conceptualizing the paper. The workforce has collaborated with worldwide co-authors from Argentina, United Kingdom, South Africa, China, Saudi Arabia, Australia, and Russia, synthesizing a wealth of expertise.

The workforce’s analysis examines ecosystem-relevant drivers at world and native spatial scales, integrating these multi-scale settings right into a framework and offering steerage on its utility utilizing particular variables from 11 salt marshes worldwide. This conceptual framework permits for correct comparability of examine websites whereas accounting for the person uniqueness of every salt marsh.

The analysis findings have been revealed within the journal Limnology and Oceanography Letters.