Steers: 



Redfield: 



Steers: 



out for longer periods of time. There you have an irregular 

 tidal regime, the mixed tides or the diurnal tides, so that there 

 would be longer periods when the marsh surface was not flooded. 

 I wondered whether that was not correlated with the dominance 

 of Salicornia, for example, which covers those western marshes 

 and which with us is not very common, and which I have the im- 

 pression grows highly dispersed on dry sandy spits. Desiccation 

 as well as salinity is the dominant limiting factor. 



By desiccation you mean tidal desiccation? 



Yes. 



Salicornia in East Anglia grows mainly on sandy places covered 

 by almost all high waters, that is, at neap tides and at spring 

 tides. 



Redfield: Well, that's all our eastern Salicornias will stand down at half 



tide level in dense Spartina, but you will also find them on new 

 sand spits where there is no other vegetation or very little 

 vegetation just up at the highest levels. They can stand the salt 

 and can also stand the long desiccation. 



Chapmian: There are a number of points I would like to add to the ones made 



by Professor Steers because the situation in New Zealand is 

 slightly different from the picture that has been outlined for 

 England and the United States. One of the first things that struck 

 me in New Zealand was the fact that there was a remarkable ab- 

 sence of salt pans. You have got enormous expanses of marsh 

 without any salt pans and besides that you don't get the elaborate 

 creek systems that are such a feature of the marshes around 

 here (Georgia). I have seen them before in Massachusetts and 

 all along this coast, and you get them in all parts of Europe, but 

 in New Zealand you haven't got this elaborate system of creeks 

 or salt pans. 



La.ck of creeks and the lack of salt pans and the development of 

 these New Zealand marshes are particularly interesting because 

 in Auckland the mangrove swamp meets the salt marsh. We are 

 just at the southern boundary of the only species of mangrove 

 that we have in New Zealand, and the two intermingle. The man- 

 grove species is the first colonist and then behind that you get 

 the biggest extent of salt marsh. 



Now there is another feature that we have in one particular salt 

 marsh. Underlying that salt marsh at quite a shallow depth there 

 is a peat deposit. It is a fresh water peat deposit and the actual 

 plant remains can be identified. In some places the peat deposit 

 is only three inches below the surface; in other places the depth 



