Coastal defences such as dikes are increasingly pressured by climate change. Increasing storm surge, extreme rainfall and periods of draught requires evermore strengthening of dikes to maintain flood risk standards. Conventional dike strengthening (i.e., heightening and/or widening) will be either structurally or financially unfeasible. Therefor, engineers are exploring other, more sustainable, methods to ensure future flood safety. A promising method is incorporating tidal marshes in the coastal defence system. Tidal marshes reduce dike loads by wave attenuation, increase bio diversity and ecology and under the right circumstances are able to grow with sea level rise. Moreover, in case of dike failure, resulting in a dike breach and inundation of the hinterland, tidal marshes have been shown to reduce breach erosion rates. This reduction positively affects flood risk. However, in order to quantitatively estimate the effect, dike breach models need to also model tidal marsh erosion. In this study we tested a mature tidal marsh, in-situ, in winter conditions under high flow velocities (up to 2.5 m/s) to measure the erosion and estimate erodibility. We measured little erosion, order millimeters after a cumulative 2-2.5 hours. Small-scale experiments, such as the Jet Erosion Test, showed high resistance to erosion (85-140 Pa) and large varying erodibility (6.5-45 cm3/N·s). By estimating the shear stresses acting on the soil during the experiment we compare the data with the small-scale results. The comparison gives insight in whether the small-scale experiment results can be accurately translated to full-scale erosion. Also, the experiment showed which (erosion) mechanisms are important for tidal marshes during a dike breach.@en

Nature-based strategies, such as wave attenuation by tidal marshes, are increasingly proposed as a complement to mitigate the risks of failure of engineered flood defense structures such as levees. However, recent analysis of historic coastal storms revealed smaller dike breach dimensions if there were natural, high tidal marshes in front of the dikes. Since tidal marshes naturally only experience weak flow velocities (~0-0.3 ms^-1 during normal spring tides), we lack direct observations on the stability of tidal marsh sediments and vegetation under extreme flow velocities (order of several ms^-1) as may occur when a dike behind a marsh breaches. As a first approximation, the stability of a tidal marsh sediment bed and winter-state vegetation under high flow velocities were tested in a flume. Marsh monoliths were excavated from Phragmites australis marshes in front of a dike along the Scheldt estuary (Dutch-Belgian border area) and installed in a 10 m long flume test section. Both sediment bed and vegetation responses were quantified over 6 experimental runs under high flow velocities up to 1.75 ms^-1 and water depth up to 0.35 m for 2 hours. These tests showed that even after a cumulative 12 hours exposure to high flow velocities, erosion was limited to as little as a few millimeters. Manual removal of the aboveground vegetation did not enhance the erosion either. Present findings may be related to the strongly consolidated, clay- and silt-rich sediment and P. australis root system in this experiment. During the flow exposure, the P. australis stems were strongly bent by the water flow, but the majority of all shoots recovered rapidly when the flow had stopped. Although present results may not be blindly extrapolated to all other marsh types, they do provide a strong first indication that marshes can remain stable under high flow conditions, and confirm the potential of well-developed tidal marshes as a valuable extra natural barrier reducing flood discharges towards the hinterland, following a dike breach. These outcomes promote the consideration to implement tidal marshes as part of the overall flood defense and to rethink dike strengthening in the future.

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