Role of mudflat-creek sediment exchanges in intertidal sedimentary processes

Intertidal environments, including bare mudflats, tidal creeks, and vegetated salt marshes, are of significant physical and ecological importance in estuaries. Their morphodynamics are closely linked by mudflats and creek networks. Understanding water motion and sediment transport in mudflats and tidal creeks is fundamental to understand intertidal morphodynamics in intertidal environments. To explore dynamic interactions between tidal creeks and mudflats, we conducted field campaigns monitoring water depths, tidal currents, waves, suspended sediments, and bed-level changes at sites in both mudflats and tidal creeks in the Eastern Chongming tidal wetland in the Yangtze Delta for a full spring-neap tidal cycle. We saw that under fair weather conditions, the bed-level changes of the tidal creek site displayed a contrary trend compared with those of the mudflat site, indicating the source-sink relationship between tidal creek and mudflat. During over-marsh tides, the tidal creek site with relatively high bed shear stresses (averagely, 0.37 N/m2) was eroded by 35 mm whereas the mudflat site was accreted by 29 mm under low bed shear stresses (averagely, 0.18 N/m2). To the contrast, during creek-restricted tides, deposition occurred in the tidal creek site by 20 mm under low bed shear stresses (averagely, 0.09 N/m2) whereas erosion occurred in the mudflat site by 25 mm under relatively high bed shear stresses (averagely, 0.21 N/m2). Over a spring-neap tidal cycle, the net bed level changes were −15 mm (erosion) and 4 mm (deposition) in tidal creeks and mudflats, respectively. These results suggested that there were alternated erosion-deposition patterns in spring and neap tides, and a sediment source and sink shift between mudflats and creeks. We found that the eroded sediments in mudflats were transported landward into tidal creeks and deposited therein in neap tides, and these newly deposited sediments would be resuspended and transported to surrounding marshes (over-marsh deposition) at spring tides. The coherent sediment transport and associated erosion-deposition pattern within the mudflat-creek system at spring-neap tidal time scales thus played a fundamental role in intertidal morphodynamic development. These findings suggest that management and restoration of intertidal ecosystem need to take the entire mudflat-creek-marsh system as a unit into consideration rather than focusing on single elements.