The upper Bay of Fundy's Cumberland Basin contains an estimated 16,500 hectares of salt marsh, nearly all of which have been diked and converted to agricultural lands since the arrival of the Acadians in the late 17 th century. John Lusby Marsh is a 600 ha salt marsh that was diked and farmed for approximately 250 years, until dikes breached in the late 1940s and the marsh was restored to tidal conditions. A sediment core that contained the reclamation surface was extracted in John Lusby Marsh, and a trial set of eight fossil pollen spectra was compared to the modern analogues. Discriminant analysis classified the fossil samples into a plausible sequence of historic land uses which included phases when the marsh was diked and farmed. A comparison of the soil characteristics and pollen spectra from this study to those in a previously published study of a nearby salt marsh at Amherst N.S. suggest that flooding of a dikeland was misinterpreted as a sudden increase in the rate of sea level rise. Historical air photos support this conclusion by showing that the sampling location was indeed diked and farmed before the 1940s.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.82245 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Graf, Maria-Theresia |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Department of Geography.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002210427, proquestno: AAIMR12456, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
Page generated in 0.0015 seconds