Infaunal abundance in restored and reference marshes of the northwestern Gulf of Mexico

Abstract

One widely accepted approach to mitigate the loss of natural marsh habitat is to restore marshes in areas that were previously open water. To better understand the infaunal community within restored marshes, infauna were collected from a restored and reference brackish marsh in East Texas. The restored marsh was constructed using multiple methods to incorporate a variety of different morphologies. A one-way ANOVA was used to determine if significant differences in species richness and density existed among the habitat types. Sediment characteristics were also measured to address infaunal-sediment relationships. No significant differences were observed between habitat types for either average infauna abundance (P= 0.654) or species richness (P = 0.748). Additionally, no significant correlations were found for sediment and total infauna abundance. Similar infaunal communities in the reference and restored marsh suggests that the recovery of constructed marshes to reference conditions occurs in less than 4 years.