@article {ganju_are_2020,
	title = {Are Elevation and Open-Water Conversion of Salt Marshes Connected?},
	journal = {Geophysical Research Letters},
	volume = {47},
	year = {2020},
	pages = {e2019GL086703},
	abstract = {Salt marsh assessments focus on vertical metrics such as accretion or lateral metrics such as open-water conversion, without exploration of how the dimensions are related. We exploited a novel geospatial data set to explore how elevation is related to the unvegetated-vegetated marsh ratio (UVVR), a lateral metric, across individual marsh {\textquotedblleft}units{\textquotedblright} within four estuarine-marsh systems. We find that elevation scales consistently with the UVVR across systems, with lower elevation units demonstrating more open-water conversion and higher UVVRs. A normalized elevation-UVVR relationship converges across systems near the system-mean elevation and a UVVR of 0.1, a critical threshold identified by prior studies. This indicates that open-water conversion becomes a dominant lateral instability process at a relatively conservative elevation threshold. We then integrate the UVVR and elevation to yield lifespan estimates, which demonstrate that higher elevation marshes are more resilient to internal deterioration, with an order-of-magnitude longer lifespan than predicted for lower elevation marshes.},
	issn = {1944-8007},
	doi = {10.1029/2019GL086703},
	url = {https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019GL086703},
	author = {Ganju, Neil K. and Defne, Zafer and Fagherazzi, Sergio}
}
