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Many plants and animals live along the world’s coastlines: Vegetation and algae occupy sand flats and floodplains, and small organisms live in the mud and build little mounts on it. These species have effects on their environment, for example by slowing down currents and stabilizing sand and mud, and thus can change the shape of the landscape. To understand the changes, and help protect coasts from the future impacts of climate change, we need to better understand how species alter coastal evolution.
Muriel Brückner developed a new computer model that combines ecological processes with the physical processes of the environment, which revealed that species determine the development of coastal landscapes up to a very large scale. Algae and plants already began to colonize the land around 524 million years ago. The model showed that this occupation of coastal environments already led to formation of mudflats. Today, saltmarsh promotes muddy and stable morphologies more effectively than biofilms, but both reduce mud flowing into the ocean. In contrast, worms and crabs stir up the mud, which causes erosion of coasts and flooding of wider area. In short, plants stabilise coastlines, but animals destabilise them, and the balance depends on the specific species and their abundance and the health of the ecosystem. In the future, climate change threatens ecosystem health and will alter the way coasts evolve. Making room for saltmarshes on the coast would cause capture sand and mud that will help counteract risks predicted with increasing sea levels and storms.