Rapid Land Cover Change in a Submerging Coastal County

Sea level rise is reshaping the coasts, allowing coastal habitats such as tidal marshes to migrate inland. To predict where changes will occur, it is critical to understand the factors that influence land cover transition. Here, we test the influence of land cover type on land cover transition. We hypothesized that marsh migration may vary by upland land cover type, due to dominant plant species' differences in salinity and inundation tolerance. Additionally, the response of people may make specific land cover types more likely to be protected from transition. We measured land cover change in high resolution aerial imagery over the relatively short period of 2009 to 2017 in coastal Somerset County, Maryland. In logistic models of land cover transition, we found that 'agricultural land' and 'scrub shrub wetland / forested wetland' cover classes were more likely to transition to 'emergent wetland' than 'forest/scrub shrub' or 'urban or built-up land' cover classes, after controlling for elevation and distance to shore, two well-known predictors of marsh migration. Over only 8 years, loss of upland area in the county totaled 6.1 km(2), of which 5.7 km(2)was agricultural land. This represents a loss of over 2% of the farmland in the county, the majority of which converted to emergent wetland during the study period.