Estuarine Ecohydrology: An Introduction

Estuarine Ecohydrology - An Introduction

Second Edition

Eric Wolanski

TropWATER and College of Marine and Environmental Sciences, James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia

Australian Institute of Marine Science, Townsville, Australia

Michael Elliott

Institute of Estuarine and Coastal Studies (IECS), The University of Hull, Hull, UK

Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

About the Authors

Preface to the 2nd Edition

1: Introduction

Publisher Summary

1.1 What is an estuary?

1.2 Humanity and estuaries

1.3 Ecohydrology as the solution

1.4 Ecohydrological science: The structure of this book

2: Estuarine water circulation

Publisher Summary

2.1 The tides at sea

2.2 The residence time of water

2.3 The age of water

2.4 Exposure time versus residence time

2.5 Stratification

2.6 Lateral stratification, trapping, and streakiness

2.7 The importance of the bathymetry on currents

2.8 The importance of coastal currents and waves for estuarine flushing

2.9 The importance of storms on the estuarine circulation

2.10 The special case of lagoons

2.11 The influence of the Earth rotation

2.12 Ship waves

3: Estuarine sediment dynamics

Publisher Summary

3.1 Geomorphological time scales

3.2 Sediment properties and dynamics

3.3 Stability of the banks

3.4 Tidal pumping

3.5 Some engineering implications

3.6 Biological implications of the export of estuarine mud to coastal waters

3.7 Net sediment budgets

3.8 The size of the mouth

3.9 Mud and human health

4: Tidal wetlands

Publisher Summary

4.1 Description

4.2 Hydrodynamics

4.3 Wave attenuation by wetland vegetation

4.4 Ecological processes within a tidal wetland

4.5 Enhancement of estuarine fisheries

4.6 Groundwater flow

4.7 Wetlands as bioengineers

5: Estuarine ecological structure and functioning

Publisher Summary

5.1 Simple food webs

5.2 The key role of detritus

5.3 The role of groundwater

5.4 Estuarine connectivity

5.5 Stressed ecosystems

5.6 Estuarine water quality barriers

5.7 The role of estuaries for fishes and their recruitment to estuaries

5.8 The role of birds in estuarine ecohydrology

5.9 The ecology of tideless estuaries, lagoons and ICOLLS

6: Ecohydrology models

Publisher Summary

6.1 Introduction: Finding a balance between simplicity, complexity and realism

6.2 Engineering models

6.3 Ecosystem models

7: Ecohydrology solutions

Publisher Summary

7.1 Ecohydrology as a response to natural and anthropogenic problems

7.2 Freshwater supply to estuaries: Environmental flows, the essence of ecohydrology

7.3 Estuarine and coastal restoration

7.4 Managing human health threats

7.5 Habitat creation/restoration

7.6 Protection against natural hazards

7.7 Biodiversity offsetting: Ecohydrology in practice

7.8 Main lessons in ecohydrology and ecosystem engineering

7.9 What future for estuaries and coastal waters?

References

Index

Copyright

Elsevier

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This book and the individual contributions contained in it are protected under copyright by the Publisher (other than as may be noted herein).

Notices

Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical treatment may become necessary.

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.

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Dedication

We dedicate this book to our grandchildren, Oliver and Grace Wolanski, and Oliver and Dylan Elliott; we know that they enjoy healthy estuaries and coastal waters and we hope that these will remain healthy to entrust to their children.

About the Authors

Professor Eric Wolanski is an estuarine oceanographer at James Cook University and the Australian Institute of Marine Science. His research interests range from the oceanography of coral reefs, mangroves, and muddy estuaries, to the interaction between physical and biological processes determining ecosystem health in tropical waters. He has 370 publications and reports. Eric is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, the Institution of Engineers Australia (ret.), and l’Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer. He was awarded an Australian Centenary medal, a Doctorate Honoris Causa by the Catholic University of Louvain and a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Estuarine & Coastal Sciences Association. Eric is an editor-in-chief of Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science, Wetlands Ecology and Management, and the Treatise on Estuarine and Coastal Science.

Eric is a member of the editorial board of Journal of Coastal Research, Journal of Marine Systems, Ecohydrology and Hydrobiology, and Continental Shelf Research. He is a member of the Scientific and Policy Committee of the Japan-based International Center for Environmental Management of Enclosed Coastal Seas, a Visiting Professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a member of the College of Experts of the Australian Research Council.

Professor Michael Elliott is the Director of the Institute of Estuarine & Coastal Studies (IECS) and Professor of Estuarine and Coastal Sciences at the University of Hull, U.K. He is a marine biologist with wide experience in teaching, research, advisory and consultancy work in estuarine and marine aspects of ecological components and communities, and the impacts of human activities, as well as policy, governance, and management of estuaries and coasts. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and of the Society of Biology. Mike has published widely, coauthoring/coediting 15 books and contributing to over 200 scientific publications, which includes coauthoring The Estuarine Ecosystem: ecology, threats and management (with DS McLusky, OUP, 2004), Ecology of Marine Sediments: science to management (with JS Gray, OUP, 2009), and as a volume editor and contributor to the Treatise on Estuarine & Coastal Science, Elsevier, Amsterdam (Eds.-In-Chief E Wolanski & DS McLusky).

Mike has acted as an advisor on many marine and estuarine environmental matters for academia, industry, government, and statutory bodies in Europe and elsewhere. Mike is a past-president of the international Estuarine & Coastal Sciences Association (ECSA) and is also one of the four editors-in-chief of the international journal Estuarine, Coastal & Shelf Science and on the editorial board of Marine Pollution Bulletin. He is the Sir Walter Murdoch Distinguished Adjunct Professor, Murdoch University, Australia, and also has adjunct professor and research positions at Klaipeda University (Lithuania), the University of Palermo (Italy), and the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity, Grahamstown. From 2014, he was appointed an independent non-executive member of the UK Marine Science Coordinating Committee and member of the Science Advisory Board of Marine Scotland. In 2014, Mike was awarded the Laureate of the Honorary Winberg Medal of the Russian Hydrobiological Academic Society.

Preface to the 2nd Edition

The first edition of Estuarine Ecohydrology (2007, E. Wolanski) was written in response to the relatively recent addition of ecohydrology into the fields covered by estuarine science and management. Ecohydrology had long been used in freshwaters but the term had been little used for transitional and coastal habitats and environments such as those in estuaries. The book demonstrated how, based on an understanding of the processes controlling estuarine health, it is possible to quantify the estuarine ability to cope with human activities and pressures. It presented the theories, models, and real-world solutions to serve as a practical aid for designing a management plan in aiming to ensure the ecologically sustainable development of estuaries. The first edition showed how, although estuarine features varied worldwide, the threats to them and the challenges and solutions were similar.

It was pleasing that the first edition was well received and was shown to have filled a niche. However, in the intervening years, the science, management, and practice of estuarine ecohydrology has increased, even if some of the practitioners did not know that this is what they were doing. There is now a greater body of work putting hydrology, integrated ecological and physical sciences, and adaptive management in estuaries into practice. As shown by journals such as Estuarine Coastal and Shelf Science, for which we are honoured to be two of the four editors-in-chief, our scientific understanding of estuaries has greatly increased.

We now know more of the importance of connectivity in estuarine structure and functioning and of the way in which actions both in the catchment and at sea are important in influencing the management within an estuary. Similarly, there has been increasing emphasis on the need for multidisciplinary solutions to multifactorial problems and, hence, the need for estuarine workers who are comfortable in merging the natural (physico-chemical and biological) and social sciences. While we take the view that we are not trying to make environmental engineers into ecologists, or estuarine managers into hydrologists, we do emphasise that each should at least be aware of the background knowledge of the others.

Given these rapid changes to the field and the large amount of new information, both in scientific papers and in reports for industry and statutory bodies, it was decided that a new and expanded edition would be worthwhile. While it is neither possible nor necessary to repeat the detail in several excellent estuarine texts, this edition does aim to cover the main features and direct the reader to the large volume of available literature. We hope to have succeeded in this aim.

We are grateful to the many colleagues and friends worldwide in estuarine and freshwater sciences who have knowingly or unknowingly contributed to our ideas and information in the book. Amongst many others we thank Daniel Alongi (AIMS, Australia), Steve Blaber (CSIRO, Australia), Zhongyuan Chen (East China Normal University, China), Luis Chicharo (University of Algarve, Portugal), Ian Cowx (Hull, UK), Digby Cyrus (University of Zululand, South Africa), Eric Deleersnijder (Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium), Donald McLusky (Strathyre, Scotland), Maria Alexandra Teodosio (University of Algarve, Portugal), Reg Uncles (Plymouth Marine Laboratory, UK) and Alan Whitfield (SAIAB, South Africa). We hope that we have not misinterpreted their views but, of course, any errors that remain are entirely our fault.

We wish to thank Luaine Bandounas, Candice Janco, and Rowena R. Prasad at Elsevier for their help in producing this book, and our long-suffering wives Terry and Jan for not only putting up with the strain of us writing this book but also tolerating our peripatetic lifestyles looking at estuaries worldwide.

Eric Wolanski, Townsville, Qld., Australia

Michael Elliott, Hull, UK

1

Introduction

Publisher Summary

An estuary is a semienclosed body of water connected to the sea as far as the tidal limit or the salt intrusion limit and receiving freshwater runoff. The freshwater inflow may occur only for part of the year, and the connection to the sea may be closed for part of the year (e.g., by a sand bar). In some estuaries, the tidal influence may be negligible. Estuaries have been, and still are, amongst the most populated areas worldwide: they are used as transport routes, and, because of their high biological productivity, sustain a high level of food production. Because estuaries link the land and the sea, they are directly or indirectly exposed to many pressures. Those pressures include the need for space for agriculture, housing, and industrial areas; water for irrigation and industrial use and for disposing of waste; and for physical and biological resources, such as aggregates and fish. Materials being put into the estuaries include contaminants and pollutants, sediment, energy, infrastructure; materials removed from the estuaries include salt, water, fish, sediments and ‘space’. Superimposed on these local activities and pressures are the consequences of climate change. The resulting degradation of estuaries also leads to threats to human health. The ecohydrology concept recognizes that the estuarine ecosystem health is driven by links between biology and physics; that human activities in the entire catchment need to be considered; and that the best course of action is to manipulate the system to reinforce its ability to cope with human stresses. The ecosystem does not stop at the tidal limit; it comprises the whole river catchment including the river and its riverine wetlands, the estuarine wetlands, and the coastal waters. Hence, this chapter emphasizes that ecohydrology is intimately linked to ecological engineering, and that a good understanding is required in order to balance and achieve natural and societal needs.

Keywords

Dams

Ecosystem

Eutrophication

Estuary

Food

Pollution

River

Salinity

Sediment

Reclamation

Transport

Watershed

1.1 What is an estuary?

An estuary receives, occasionally, or frequently, an inflow of both freshwater and saltwater; it stores these waters temporarily while mixing them. An estuary is a buffer zone between river (freshwater) and ocean (saltwater) environments that may be affected by tidal oscillations. Many estuaries were established by the flooding of river-eroded or glacially scoured valleys during the Holocene rise of sea level starting about 10,000-12,000 years ago. Because it fills with sediment, and is thus regarded as an ephemeral feature, an estuary has an age, akin to a living organism in evolution. It starts with youth, it matures, and it then becomes old; it can be rejuvenated.

The term ‘estuary’ is derived from the Latin word ‘aestuarium’, this means tidal. This definition is however over-restrictive because estuaries also occur in conditions with no tides such as the rivers discharging into the tideless Baltic Sea and the Danube Delta in the tideless Black Sea.

There have been several definitions of an estuary, such as that of Dionne (1963):

An estuary is an inlet of the sea, reaching into the river valley as far as the upper limit of tidal rise, usually divisible into three sectors: a) a marine or lower estuary, in free connection with the open sea; d) a middle estuary, subject to strong salt and freshwater mixing, and c) an upper or fluvial estuary, characterized by freshwater but subject to daily tidal activity.

There are other definitions of an estuary. For instance Pritchard (1967) defined an estuary as ‘a semi-enclosed coastal body of water, which has a free connection with the open sea, and within which sea water is measurably diluted with fresh water derived from land drainage’. This definition based on salinity has been accepted since the publication. However, it excludes a number of coastal water bodies such as hypersaline tropical lagoons with no perennial inflows; it also seems to exclude seasonally closed lagoons; it explicitly excludes the Baltic Sea, the Seto Inland Sea in Japan, and other brackish seas.

Dalrymple et al. (1992) proposed a definition of an estuary from the point of view of the fluvial and marine sources of the sediment. Perillo (1995) offered another definition based on the dilution of freshwater with seawater and the presence of euryhaline biological species. An estuary can also be defined as the zone stretching from the tidal limit to the seaward edge of the tidal plume in the open ocean (Kjerfve, 1989). These definitions however do not capture estuaries with features such as periodic closure of their mouths and hypersaline conditions during dry periods, especially these occurring in the Southern Hemisphere such as in South Australia and South Africa. Potter et al. (2010) commented that most estuarine definitions were based on temperate areas, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, and so do not accommodate features such as periodic closure of their mouths and hypersaline conditions during dry periods. They also remarked on the ambiguity as to whether an estuary sensu stricto must be fed by a river. Thus, a more appropriate definition may be that suggested by Potter et al. (2010):

An estuary is a partially enclosed coastal body of water that is either permanently or periodically open to the sea and which receives at least periodic discharge from a river(s), and thus, while its salinity is typically less than that of natural sea water and varies temporally and along its length, it can become hypersaline in regions when evaporative water loss is high and freshwater and tidal inputs are negligible.

The definition of an estuary in this book combines all these definitions; that is, an estuary is a semienclosed body of water connected to the sea as far as the tidal limit or the salt intrusion limit and receiving freshwater runoff, recognising that the freshwater inflow may not be perennial (i.e. it may occur only for part of the year) and that the connection to the sea may be closed for part of the year (e.g. by a sand bar) and that the tidal influence may be negligible (Figure 1.1). The definition includes fjords, fjards, river mouths, deltas, rias, lagoons, tidal creeks, as well as the more classical estuaries. It recognises commonalities with predominantly brackish areas such as the Baltic Sea, and freshwater-poor coastal waters in arid zones.

Figure 1.1 Example of three primary types of estuaries: (a) valley estuaries, (b) estuarine lagoons/lakes, (c) river mouths. Modified from Fairbridge (1980).

It is also difficult to define where an estuary ends and this is usually assumed to be an abrupt coastline break but gradual geomorphological changes show that many estuaries change shape gradually, thus the transition between river, estuary, coastal embayment, and open coast is gradual and not always obvious. Whitfield and Elliott (2011) detail the many types of classification of the estuaries. To accommodate these problems, through the Water Framework Directive, the European Union coined the word ‘Transitional Waters’ as ‘bodies of surface water in the vicinity of river mouths which are partly saline in character as a result of their proximity to coastal waters but which are substantially influenced by freshwater flows’. Some of these ‘transitional waters’ are neither river mouths nor have substantially lowered salinity, and they are neither rivers nor open coasts but are taken to include estuaries, rias, fjords, lagoons, and other types of intermediate water body (Elliott and McLusky, 2002; McLusky and Elliott, 2007).

As shown by recent analyses, estuaries are now considered as ecosystems in their own right rather than either the ends of rivers or inlets of the sea (Elliott and Whitfield, 2011; Whitfield et al., 2012; Basset et al., 2013; and the extensive reviews in Wolanski and McLusky, 2011, and references therein). Therefore, in order to consider their physicochemical and ecological structure and functioning and the management of them in relation to their adjoining marine area and catchment, it is valuable to summarise their features as ‘paradigms’ based on a wide understanding of estuaries worldwide (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1

Challenging paradigms in estuarine ecology and management (from Elliott and Whitfield, 2011)

Adapted from Elliott and Whitfield (2011).

1.2 Humanity and estuaries

Estuaries and continental shelf areas comprise 5.2% of the earth surface, and only 2% of the ocean volume. However, they carry a disproportionate human load and support many of the world’s megacities and their associated demands on the estuarine, adjacent marine and freshwater systems (Sekovski et al., 2012; Pelling and Blackburn, 2014). At present, about 60% of the global population lives along the estuaries and the coast (Lindeboom, 2002). Throughout human history, estuaries have been amongst the most populated areas over the world. This is because people used them as transport routes, and because of their high biological productivity sustaining a high level of food production; indeed, coastal waters supply about 90% of the global fish catch (Wolanski et al., 2004).

The human population worldwide is currently doubling every 30-50 years (Figure 1.2), and this increase is unprecedented in human history. Because of internal migration of people away from the hinterland towards the coast, the population is now doubling every 20 years along many coasts. Hence, that population is exposed to any changes to the coast and hazards caused by natural and anthropogenic causes (Nicholls and Small, 2002; Elliott et al., 2014).

Figure 1.2 Recent growth of the human population. U.S. Bureau of the Census, International Data Base.

Given the central role of estuaries in the connectivity between the land and the sea, and given their links to the catchments, the urbanisation and industrialisation, then they are directly or indirectly exposed to many pressures (Elliott and Whitfield, 2011). The cumulative impact of these pressures is severe; the estuaries are increasingly unable to sustain the quality of life that people searched for when migrating to the coast in the first place. The reasons for this degradation are many and are described in Kennish and Elliott (2011) and Elliott et al. (2014) but in essence the anthropogenic problems come from three sources: materials that are put into the estuaries, materials taken out from the estuaries, and wider originating problems such as climate change. Materials being put into the estuaries include contaminants and pollutants, sediment, energy (cold water from desalination plants, and hot water from power plants), and infrastructure (land claim, bridges, dams, etc.). Materials removed from the estuaries include salt, water, fish, sediments, and ‘space’ (McLusky and Elliott, 2004). Superimposed on these local activities and pressures are the consequences of climate change (see below and also Chapter 7). They and the resulting problems include the following.

1.2.1 Sedimentation from erosion from cleared land in the catchment

Deforestation, overgrazing and other poor farming practises, as well as roads and mining, increase soil erosion (Figure 1.3) and the sediment loads in rivers by typically a factor of 10 largely independently of catchment size and mainly dependent on the degree of land clearing in the mountainous part of the river catchment (Table 1.2).

Figure 1.3 Photographs of (a) land clearing to the edge of a small estuary draining into the Great Barrier Reef of Australia; (b) cattle overgrazing the banks of the Ord River estuary, Australia; (c) massive land slide from the discharge of mining waste in the upper Fly River estuary, Papua New Guinea; (d) massive mud flow smothering the coastal plains from a land slide in the Philippines, likely initiated by deforestation over steep slopes. Photos (a) and (d) are courtesy of V. Veitch and J. Ramirez.

Table 1.2

Comparison of the drainage areas, the sediment load and the yield for various rivers

Data from Wolanski and Spagnol (2000), Syvitski et al. (2005), Wolanski et al. (2013).

The effect of deforestation on estuaries is much more rapid in the tropics than in temperate zones because of intense rainfall in the tropics. The catchments of the Cimanuk and La Sa Fua rivers are small and profoundly modified by human activities. The Ngerdoch River drains a hilly, forested area. The sediment yield is largely determined by the climate, the topography and human activities, and is weakly dependent on the catchment size.

As a result, the shoreline can change from sandy to muddy (Figure 1.4), and this diminishes the shore ecological quality as well as the quality of the life of the human population living nearby. The increased muddiness and turbidity smothers the benthos (Figure 1.5a) and degrades the ecosystem by decreasing the light available for photosynthesis. This degradation is further increased by dredging (Figure 1.5b) and dumping of dredged mud within the estuary (Figure 1.5c).

Figure 1.4 The coastline of Cairns, Australia, has changed in one century from sandy to muddy as a result of land clearing in the catchment. Adapted from Wolanski and Duke (2002).

Figure 1.5 Photographs of (a) a coral reef smothered and killed by eroded soil as a result of land clearing, Airai Bay, Palau; (b) the sediment plume in the lee of a dredger, Townsville, Australia; (c) discharging dredged mud, Singapore; (d) habitat destruction and the sediment plume from a trawl net, Great Barrier Reef of Australia; (e) overfishing the Yangtze estuary tidal wetlands in China using nets with an extremely small mesh; (f) hardening the shore of the Yangtze estuary, China. Photo (a) was provided by R.H. Richmond. Photo (d) is modified from Wolanski (2001a). Photos (e) and (f) were provided by Z. Chen.

Land clearing also increases peak flood flows by up to 30% and decreases dry season flows, thus exacerbating flooding in the wet season and droughts in the dry season (Wolanski and Spagnol, 2000).

1.2.2 Overfishing and trawling

This muddies the water, destroys fish stock and damages or destroys the benthos and habitats (Figure 1.5d; Trimmer et al., 2005; Jennings et al., 2002; Rijnsdorp et al., 1998). It adversely affects the target and non-target sizes and species, especially affecting the fish nursery grounds in the estuaries (Blaber et al., 2000; Elliott and Hemingway, 2002). The decline of coastal fish stocks has been dramatic worldwide; for example, the demersal fisheries biomass in Manila Bay has decreased from 8290 tonnes in 1947 to 840 tonnes in 1993 (Jacinto et al., 2006). As well as their importance as nursery grounds, estuaries are important as migration routes for diadromous commercial species such as eel and salmon (Able et al., 2006). As another example, the declared (excluding the undeclared catches from poaching) annual catch of the Beluga sturgeon in the mid-Danube was 400-600 tonnes in 1950, 23 tonnes on the average between 1972 and 1976, and 7.5 tonnes on average between 1985 and 1989. In 2002, 21.3 tonnes were caught in Romania, whilst only 8.4 tonnes were caught in 2005. In 2006 the catching of Beluga was banned in the Danube to try to save the species from extinction (Ioan Jelev, NIHWM, Bucharest, pers.com; Gesner et al., 2010).

Overfishing often is due to using nets with a very small mesh that catch the juveniles (Figure 1.5e). The destruction of the natural shores of estuaries (Figure 1.5f) and estuarine wetlands such as reed beds, salt marshes, mangroves, and sea grass beds, which previously offered microhabitats as a refuge to the fish, also leads to the collapse of the fish stock.

1.2.3 Destruction of wetlands

The increasing urbanisation, agriculturalisation, and industrialisation have led to major losses in estuarine area; this previously was mistakenly called reclamation but is now regarded as land claim as wetland is being claimed from the sea rather than reclaimed (McLusky and Elliott, 2004). Despite their importance, estuarine, tidal wetlands are under threat worldwide from urbanisation, agriculturalisation, industrialisation, and aquaculture, and this is particularly the case in Southeast Asia and southern America. As shown in later chapters, this is countered in other countries by habitat restoration in which these wetlands are being recreated (Mazik et al., 2010). Wetlands have been claimed for harbours and marinas (Figure 1.6a), urbanisation including slums (Figure 1.6b), garbage disposal (Figure 1.6c), aquaculture (Figure 1.6d), and dykes for agricultural land for farming (Figure 1.6e). Nearly all estuarine marshes have already been claimed in Japan and in The Netherlands, resulting in a decrease of soil elevation, a major cause of flooding. The historical loss of wetlands has removed the input of detritus from the estuarine wetland macrophytes, which in turn fuels the invertebrate populations that support the wading bird populations (Boyes and Elliott, 2006; see also Chapter 5). The drainage of wetlands can also lead to acidification problems that result in vegetation and fish kills (Figure 1.6f; Soukup and Portnoy, 1986).

Figure 1.6 Photographs of (a) urbanisation that destroyed wetlands of the Coomera River estuary, Gold Coast, Australia; (b) slums that have infilled wetlands along the Mekong River estuary, Vietnam; (c) a sarcocornia salt marsh near petrochemical industry in Bahia Blanca, Argentina, that is used for garbage dumping; (d) the wet desert created by dead and dying shrimp ponds that have destroyed mangrove forests in Chumpon, Thailand; (e) a dyke that destroyed 70% of a mangrove swamp in Trinity Island, Cairns, Australia; (f) a fish kill from acid leachate from drainage of a wetland near Ingham, Australia. Photos (a), (c), and (f) are courtesy of N. Duke, R. Lara, and V. Veitch.

1.2.4 Eutrophication

This is regarded as a suite of symptoms showing the anthropogenic degradation caused by excessive nutrients; much of it is derived from sewage (Figure 1.7a), fertilisers from agriculture, and animal waste from agricultural feedlots (Figure 1.7b). There are many symptoms of eutrophication, all of which are the product of the physical characteristics and hydrodynamics of the estuary (de Jonge and Elliott, 2001).

Figure 1.7 Photographs of (a) a sewage outfall surfacing in a ‘boil’ in Lagos Lagoon, Nigeria; (b) a cattle feedlot in Coalinga, California, discharging into creeks the effluent from 120,000 cattle; (c) a fish kill from the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico; (d) a red algal bloom at Leigh, near Cape Rodney, New Zealand. Photos (b) and (c) are courtesy of R. Tuner and (d) is from NIWA.

Firstly, eutrophic waters suffer from a significant reduction in dissolved oxygen leading to hypoxia (dissolved oxygen concentration, DO < 2 mg l− 1) and anoxia (DO = 0; Diaz and Rosenberg, 1995; Richardson and Jorgensen, 1996). The benthos and resident fauna will become stressed at hypoxic conditions with DO < 5 mg l− 1 and then often die during anoxia when the DO is < 1 mg l− 1 (Figure 1.7c). When hypoxia occurs, mobile fauna such as fish, crabs, and shrimp attempt to migrate away. Similarly, at DO < 5 mg l− 1 migrating fish start responding by waiting for better conditions and by < 3 mg l− 1 the hypoxic area will act as a water quality barrier and prevent fish from migrating (Elliott and Hemingway, 2002; see Chapter 5).

Secondly, eutrophication can lead to noxious, nuisance, or harmful algae blooms (HABs), which are now common in many estuaries and coastal seas (Figure 1.7d; Davidson et al., 2012). Hypoxia and anoxia are now common occurrences worldwide in many estuaries subject to intense human stresses (McLusky and Elliott, 2004) and the problem is spreading to poorly flushed coastal embayments such as in Japan the Seto Inland Sea, Osaka Bay, and Tokyo Bay, where HABs occur 100 days per year (Okaichi and Yanagi, 1997; Takahasi et al., 2000; Furukawa and Okada, 2006). Hypoxia and anoxia are also becoming increasingly common in coastal waters worldwide Figure 1.8a. In the Gulf of Mexico, the discharge of the Mississippi River creates a ‘dead zone’; that is, a bottom-tagging, hypoxic water zone (< 2 mg l− 1 O2) of 8000-9000 km² in 1985-1992, and increasing to 16,000-20,000 km² in 1993-2000 (Rabalais et al., 2002). Hypoxic waters cover 84,000 km² of the Baltic Sea where historically hypoxia existed but anoxic events became more frequent and widespread in the 1970s and 1980s. Declines in bottom-water dissolved oxygen have been reported for the northern Adriatic Sea, the Kattegat and Skaggerak, Chesapeake Bay, the German Bight, the North Sea, and Long Island Sound in New York. The human activities degrading these coastal waters are not just located on the coast. Instead they occur throughout the drainage basin. For instance for the Black Sea the nutrients are brought in by the Danube River that drains eight European countries, and for the Gulf of Mexico by the Mississippi River that drains much of the United States (Rabalais et al., 2002; Richardson and Jorgensen, 1996; Zaitsev, 1992; Lancelot et al., 2002). The presence of poor flushing conditions combined with a good light regime will provide the ideal conditions for microalgae to bloom although in many estuaries, the higher turbidity and thus shallow photic zone may create limiting conditions for the algal growth (de Jonge and Elliott, 2001).

Figure 1.8 (a) A location map of the dead zones in coastal waters in the northern hemisphere, together with POC concentration and human population density in the river catchments. Source: NASA. (b) A photograph of a bloom of green macroalgae in the Yellow Sea. Panel (a): NASA; panel (b): photo courtesy of Qingxi Han.

Thirdly, eutrophication can also lead to massive blooms of floating macroalgae that carpet the water surface; for instance in the Yellow Sea such blooms of Ulva prolifera in summer cover several thousand kilometre Square (Figure 1.8b; Liu et al., 2013). Those macroalgal mats will hinder the resource use of the area by, for example, preventing wading birds from reaching their prey. Society then sees the large ‘aesthetic pollution’ caused by the macroalgal mats as amenity is affected, such as for water sports.

Fourthly and consequently, the die-off of the macro- and microalgae delivers large quantities of organic matter to the bed and creates large populations of opportunistic, pollution-tolerant macrobenthic invertebrates (Gray and Elliott, 2009). In high-energy conditions, that organic matter will be more easily degraded and poses less of a threat, whereas in low-energy conditions typical of many estuaries, it creates the adverse conditions analogous to all types of organic enrichment.

In some cases, the degradation of the coastal marine ecosystem is not just due to nutrients from farms and cities, it is the combined effect of these nutrients together with sediment, pesticides, and herbicides from land use. This demonstrates the imperative to manage the entire estuarine and marine ecosystem including the catchment as one system (Mee, 2012).

1.2.5 Chemical pollution

By definition, contamination is the result of adding materials to the estuarine system whereas pollution relates to the biological effects and often a reduction in the health of the system (McLusky and Elliott, 2004). That reduction in health is manifest at all levels of biological organisation from the cell and individual to the population, community and eventually ecosystem, and the assumption is made that the effects of contamination move through that sequence unless either the system can absorb the effects or the component (cell, individual, population, etc.) can survive without its functioning being impaired (Tett et al., 2013). Pollutants include