Can restoring tidal wetlands reduce estuarine nuisance flooding of coasts under future sea-level rise?

Abstract

Wetland restoration is an increasingly popular nature-based method for flood risk mitigation in coastal communities. In this study, we present a novel method using hydrodynamic modeling and harmonic analysis to quantify wetlands' ability to reduce future nuisance flooding. The method leverages a hydrodynamic model calibrated to present day data and was run for a range of future sea-level rise and wetland restoration scenarios to quantify changes to tidal harmonic amplitudes and phases. The harmonic constituents are used to generate water surface elevations over a time period of interest (e.g. one year) and compared to critical exceedance thresholds such as levee elevations. Then, changes to nuisance flooding are calculated by counting the number of hours critical thresholds are exceeded under different sea-level rise and wetland restoration scenarios. We applied the method to Coos Bay, Oregon, USA as a test case. We found restoration reduces the number of hours nuisance flooding occurs in downtown Coos Bay from 15 hours (present day conditions) to 0 hours (fully restored condition) under median sea-level rise (82 cm by 2100). Restoration had spatially variable impacts on reducing peak flood elevations with minimal impacts near the estuary mouth and greatest impact 32 km inland. The effectiveness of restoration was heavily dependent on future sea-level rise. Restoration was maximally effective in 2050 under all sea-level rise scenarios, less effective in 2100 under median SLR, and not effective under high SLR. Modeling results suggest increased tidal prism and accommodation space are driving reductions in tidal amplitudes.