Hudson River Estuary Tidal Marsh Sediment Data

This repository contains data from sediment cores collected at six tidal wetland complexes that are located within the Hudson River Estuary. The sites include Stockport Marsh, Esopus Delta, Tivoli North Bay, Tivoli South Bay, Vanderburgh Cove, and Iona Island Marsh. A variety of core collection tools and methods were used to collect uncompacted records, including gouge coring, Russian peat coring, and piston push coring, with the method determined by coring environment. The general workflow for cores included (1) splitting; (2) Itrax XRF scanning; (3) subsampling cores ~10 cm spacing; (4) drying and burning samples for percent water, organic, and mineral content. Gamma spectroscopy was used to identify down-core profiles of 137Cs and 210Pb in at least one representative core from each site. Relative abundance and onset of heavy metals zinc (Zn) and lead (Pb) as recorded in X-ray Flourecense (XRF) data were used as additional supportive age constraint in cores. Collectively, data from these cores provide evidence within the tidal freshwater Hudson River for rapid accretion within anthropogenic tidal freshwater wetlands relative to those that developed prior to the industrial era.