Salt marshes as late Holocene tide gauges

Abstract

. (2013) 'Salt marshes as late Holocene tide gauges. ', Global and planetary change.,[106][107][108][109][110] Further information on publisher's website:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2013.03.003Publisher's copyright statement: NOTICE: this is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Global and planetary change. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A denitive version was subsequently published in Global and planetary change, 106, 2013Global and planetary change, 106, , 10.1016Global and planetary change, 106, /j.gloplacha.2013 Additional information:The north west Scotland modern diatom dataset presented in the paper is available for download from: http://www.dur.ac.uk/geography/qec/researchgroups/slru/sea l evel d ata/ Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Keywords:Relative sea-level change; salt marsh; transfer function; diatoms; foraminifera; reconstruction; trends; Holocene; errors 2 AbstractUnderstanding late Holocene to present relative sea-level changes at centennial or sub-centennial scales requires geological records that dovetail with the instrumental era. Salt marsh sediments are one of the most reliable geological tide gauges.In this paper we review the methodological and technical advances that promoted research on 'high resolution' late Holocene sea-level change. We work through an example to demonstrate different pathways to quantitative reconstructions of relative sea level based on salt marsh sediments. We demonstrate that any reconstruction is in part a result of the environment from which the record is taken, the modern dataset used to calibrate the fossil changes, statistical assumptions behind calibrating microfossil assemblages and choices made by the researchers. With the error term of typical transfer function models ~10-15% of the tidal range, micro-tidal environments should produce the most precise sea-level reconstructions. Sampled elevation range of the modern dataset also has a strong influence on model predictive ability. Model-specific errors may under represent total uncertainty which comes from field practices, sedimentary environment, palaeo-tidal changes and sediment compaction as well as statistical uncertainties. Geological tide gauges require a detailed chronology but we must be certain that apparent relative s...

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