With being published in 1918 Tidal Lands (s.p.b.s) considers the reclamation of lowland foreshores to be an automatic good (waste land made productive), nowhere do the authors hint at any sense of loss when changing the shoreline ecosystem. The photo above (p. 167) shows the vegetated ‘high saltmarsh’ being grazed by horses and, in the foreground, the sparsely vegetated ‘low saltmarsh’, this reminding that the natural saltmarsh of lowland coasts is not killed-off by grazing but is by over-grazing. Today a different perspective prevails in that saltmarsh is a rapidly declining ecosystem with some protection in law. Along the Humber Estuary foreshore any loss of saltmarsh from industrial development has to be compensated by the establishment of more saltmarsh in another location in the region, planning permission relies on this understanding with the Environment Agency overseeing the process. Furthermore in the revised flood management scheme areas of ‘managed realignment’ are areas of potential colonisation of saltmarsh.
Saltmarsh is really a collective term for a certain ecosystem/local environment. For example the caption for the above picture from Tidal Lands records that on the ‘high saltmarsh’ two types of plant are growing Glyceria maritima and Armeria maritima, while on the ‘low saltmarsh’ patches of Suaeda maritima are growing – this along a section of the coast of Belgium.