Salt Marsh Abundance by Marine Ecoregion

Relative abundance of salt marsh habitat, by marine ecoregion.

We compiled a global database on salt marshes in collaboration with UNEP-WCMC and with input from Paul Adam, University of New South Wales, Australia. In this database, habitat abundance was estimated using the array of point locations and GIS data holdings from this database and were broadly based on abundance as a proportion of the total coastline length in each ecoregion. Salt marshes were poorly covered in the literature for some parts of the Arctic coastline and from wide areas of the tropics where salt marshes were often overlooked or classified within mangrove areas. While efforts were made to target data searching for these regions, there may still be some underestimation.

These data were derived by The Nature Conservancy and UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre, and were displayed in a map published in The Atlas of Global Conservation (Hoekstra et al., University of California Press, 2010). More information at http://nature.org/atlas.