A hydrological switch drives the transition from saltmarsh to peat-forming reedland ecosystems

The authors would like to thank Jing Feng for providing and offering insight to the reports accompanying the vegetation maps of Saeftinghe, Jackie Ashkin and Mingxuan Wu for their help during the Saeftinghe field work measurements. For the help and guidance during the historical peat development geological surveys (2022-2025), many thanks to Walter Jonkers and Bernard Meijlink and the bachelors students of the Earth Sciences department from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Jonina Karman, Femke ter Schure, Maaike de Graaff, Demi Imming, Kilian van Roosmalen, Solveig de Reus and Martijn Hoogveld. BSc thesis reports from the students supporting the geological core descriptions are unpublished internal reports available from the corresponding author upon request. We further thank the landowners of the coring sites near Ritthem, Oostkapelle and Yerseke for granting permission to conduct geological coring on their land.

The research of A.V. and J.v.d.K. was supported by the project Defending our Coast (grant number UUNIOZ 4543.15) funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), a UU-NIOZ collaboration. Additional funding was provided by the Province of Zeeland and the Geopark Schelde Delta. M.B., D.v.d.W., C.K., G.K.K., M.G.K., N.V.d.P., M.R. declare no relevant funding.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Estuarine and Delta Systems, Royal Netherlands Institute of Sea Research, Yerseke, The Netherlands

   Archontoula Valsamidou, Daphne van der Wal & Johan van de Koppel

2. Department of Environmental Sciences, Copernicus Institute, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

   Archontoula Valsamidou & Max Rietkerk

3. Department of Zoology, Marine Behavioural Ecology Group, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

   Malou Bastiaanse

4. Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

   Daphne van der Wal

5. Department of Earth Sciences, Faculty of Science, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

   Cornelis Kasse & Nathalie Van der Putten

6. Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

   Gabriele K. Keller

7. Department of Physical Geography, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

   Maarten G. Kleinhans

8. Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences, Conservation Ecology Group, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

   Johan van de Koppel

Corresponding author

Correspondence to
Archontoula Valsamidou.

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Reprints and permissions