Ecology of intertidal flats of North Carolina: a community profile

Community profile serves as an introduction to the ecology of intertidal sand and mud flats. Our main goal is to describe the ecological processes that characterize a habitat which, at first glance, appears barren and almost devoid of life. We emphasize and draw all our examples from the intertidal flats of coastal North Carolina with which we are most familiar. To the degree that we are successful in describing general processes of ecosystem function on an intertidal flat, what we have to say can be widely applied to the intertidal shorelines of sounds, lagoons, estuaries, and river mouths in temperate zones throughout the world.