Overview

Estuaries are among the most productive systems on Earth and provide a wide range of ecosystem services. However, estuarine ecosystems are severely threatened by nutrient over-enrichment. Anthropogenically-driven local and global change (e.g., land-use and land cover change, climate change) threaten to alter the quantity and quality of riverine discharges to estuaries, thereby also threatening the ecological integrity of these systems.

This interactive web-based application aims to display the vulnerability of 112 US estuarine systems across five regions based on projected water quality change by integrating climate and land-use projections under several scenarios defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity pages allow the user to interact with the data, download data subsets. The app also allows users to modify weights applied to some of the factors comprising estuarine vulnerability to nutrient loading, thus allowing them to evaluate how vulnerability may vary based on the perceived importance of individual system characteristics.

This interactive app presents information and data from the paper, Vulnerability of Estuarine Systems in the Contiguous United States to Water Quality Change Under Future Climate and Land-Use.