A tool for assessing mercury loadings from restored tidal systems

Accurately quantifying net loads in tidal systems is difficult owing to the high variability in constituent concentrations over the vastly different time scales present in these systems. Perhaps most difficult is the measurement of fluxed over the tidal time scale. On this scale, the net export of the constituent is orders of magnitude less than the bulk exchange in either direction because of the vast quantities of water that are exchanged. Therefore, numerous measurements are required in a brief amount of time to accurately quantify constituent fluxes between a tidal wetland and its surrounding waters. These complications with sampling are exacerbated for mercury species because of the difficulties is to develop surrogates that may be measured in situ and which may be used for interpolating and extrapolating from discrete measurements over a number of tidal cycles and a range of conditions.