A first step towards modelling confinement of paralic ecosystems

This paper deals with the concept of confinement of paralic ecosystems. It presents a modelling procedure in order to compute the confinement field of a lagoon without tide. Then it realizes an improvement in this concept allowing it to be used for tide-influenced lagoons. This improvement consists essentially in including the tide wave into the confinement computation. Finally, using a simplified model of benthic population dynamics, this improved version shows that confinement may explain benthic population distribution even in paralic ecosystems with strong tide.