Coastal Forest Change and Shoreline Erosion across a Salinity Gradient in a Micro-Tidal Estuary System
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsComments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 1
We added the relative sea level rise rate for the APES, 5.56 mm/yr measured from tide gauges. The majority of subsidence is from post-glacial isostatic rebound, the system in general is sediment poor and relies on organic sediment accretion to maintain elevation. This was added to the introduction, page 2, and discussion of organic accretion is on page 13 of the discussion.
1: Labels updated on Figure 1 map to indicate field study locations as well as major estuary rivers mentioned in text.
2: Change completed in Table 1.
3: The regression here shows all 33 study sites combined, there are many instances of anthropogenically modified marshes, ghost forests, and even coastal forests that have anomalously high rates of shoreline erosion. These data are representative of the APES system and should be considered valuable when assessing overall trends in shoreline change. Table 2 and Figure 4 show these same trends when considering open vs. protected shorelines. Additional study of the impact of anthropogenic modification would be interesting, but beyond the scope of our current study.
4: Section 3.4 and 3.5 were updated to clarify measurements between historical-modern shorelines were taken and more information on field sampling (core diameter etc.) given. All soils were described (including peat depths) using standard United States Department of Agriculture methods as cited in this section.
5: Section 3.6, updated language to salinity throughout. Halinity (soil salts derived mainly from halides) is analogous to salinity.
Figure 6: These data show area submerged, the figure caption was updated for consistency.
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsAll comments are in attached file
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
1: Direct evidence of the study longitudinal salinity gradient is presented in Table 1. Sites cover a range of mean annual ecosystem salinity ranging from 0.15 (fresh) in tidal forests to 15.47 (mesohaline) in tidal marshes of the study. There is a known correlation between ecosystem type and mean annual salinity within the study estuary, with 2 ppt initiating ghost forest formation. Therefore, site vegetation was used as a proxy for salinity.
2: This is an excellent point about the complexity of wave formation. We added discussion on page 13 of the updated manuscript regarding wave formation. Because we did not model waves in the system we noted this as one of the reasons for increased variability in regressions with fetch predicting shoreline change rates.
3: We added discussion of this on page 13 of the updated manuscript. These statistical relationships include varied outliers as well as heterogeneous information across the expected range of fetch within the APES. However, the data presented is similar to other regional studies so are considered statistically significant by the authors. Additional work as suggested by reviewer 2 on wave modelling (taking into account bathymetry, wind speed/direction, and shoreline orientation) would likely improve the statistical significance of regressions across the entire estuary. This type of modelling is however beyond the scope of the current study.
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authorsthe ms is ok
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsAccept in present form
