Semi Aquatic Temperate Marine plants? Anyone?

Oregon has between 1.2 and 1.5 million acres of wetlands (J.F. Watson, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, written commun., 1993). Palustrine, lacustrine, and estuarine wetlands constitute most of the State's wetland acreage. The area of marine and riverine wetlands is small relative to that in the other systems.

Coastal wetlands.--The steep slopes of Oregon's Coast Range mountains extend to the Pacific Ocean along much of the coast, leaving little area for wetland formation. Thus, coastal wetlands are confined mainly to areas of accumulated sediment near the mouths of rivers that have cut through the mountains and to the dune regions that have formed where the Coast Range front is distant from the ocean.

Estuarine wetlands have developed in the shallow, low-gradient reaches near the mouths of Oregon's coastal rivers and in their deltas. Estuarine wetlands cover about 55,600 acres, and there are about 10,000 acres of tidal fresh marsh, mostly in the Columbia River estuary (Oregon Division of State Lands and Oregon State Parks and Recreation Division, 1989). Akins and Jefferson (1973) identified three major types of estuarine wetlands in Oregon: tideflats, eelgrass beds, and salt marshes.

Tideflats (unconsolidated-shore wetlands) are mostly nonvegetated and exist where accumulations of sediment (sand, silt, clay, or gravel) are flooded and exposed daily by tides. Eelgrass-bed (aquatic-bed) wetlands are tideflats that have been extensively colonized by eelgrass, a plant that can tolerate high salinity and periods of exposure. Salt marshes (emergent wetlands) are regularly to irregularly flooded emergent wetlands vegetated by salt-tolerant plants such as rushes, sedges, glasswort, and arrowgrass. Most of Oregon's large estuaries also contain areas of diked marsh, former salt marshes that have been diked and drained. Diked wetlands are commonly used for cattle grazing.

Coastal nontidal fresh marshes, swamps, bogs, and ponds are palustrine wetlands that have formed around and in lakes and windscoured depressions among sand dunes (Akins and Jefferson, 1973). The areas containing most of the coastal nontidal wetlands are the Clatsop Plains, which extend from the Columbia River to Gearhart, the broad dune, sheet that extends from Haceta Head to Coos Bay, and the low dunes between Bandon and Cape Blanco. Isolated dune areas containing wetlands are present between Tillamook Bay and Waldport.