Web Resource

Future San Francisco Bay Tidal Marshes, A Climate Smart Planning Tool

An online decision support tool for managers, planners, conservation practitioners and scientists.

The models generating these maps are the first to take into account the ability of marshes to accrete, or keep up with, rising sea levels, in the San Francisco Bay Estuary.
PRBO has generated a series of scenarios to provide a range of projections to address the uncertainty in future rates of sea-level rise and suspended sediment availability.
Our maps cover the entire Estuary allowing for analyses at multiple spatial scales.
This tool displays maps created at a high spatial resolution using the best available elevation data. The website will be continually updated as new data becomes available
The tool is the first to provide spatially explicit projections of vegetation and bird distributions throughout the Estuary

Uses for the Point Blue Sea-Level Rise tool:

View and query maps to understand how sea level rise may change the extent of tidal marsh habitat and bird species distribution over the next 100 years
Make informed decisions about adaptation planning, restoration potential, and land acquisition given various sea-level rise and sedimentation scenarios.
Identify areas both vulnerable and resilient to future sea-level rise.

Limitations of this tool:

· Modeling results are sensitive to the availability of suspended sediment and our estimates of the spatial distribution of sediment in the estuary do not incorporate fine scale heterogeneity in sediment availability.
· The marsh accretion model is a one dimensional model and therefore does not account for the transport of sediment or other processes such as erosion. However, there is currently no other alternative modeling framework available for projecting these processes at the spatial and temporal scales applied in this report.
· The restoration prioritization analyses only evaluated the potential habitat available for tidal marsh birds. Including other taxa would likely change the results. We recommend that future efforts should include the habitat needs of other taxa such as shorebirds.
· The details of individual projects were not including in the modeling. For example, we did not change our base elevation layer to incorporate plans to raise initial elevations in subsided locations. Project specific plans could be incorporated in future analyses if the information is available and is spatially explicit.

Recommended citation for the web application: Veloz, S., M. Fitzgibbon, D. Stralberg, S. Michaile, D. Jongsomjit, D. Moody, N. Nur, L. Salas, J. Wood, and G. Ballard. 2011. San Francisco Bay sea level rise: Climate change scenarios for tidal marsh habitats. [web application]. Petaluma, California. www.prbo.org/sfbayslr. (Accessed: March 31, 2011). (change accessed date as needed)

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Point Blue Conservation Science
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Point Blue Conservation Science
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