Abstract Coastal wetlands provide multiple ecosystem services to coastal communities, including climate regulation, flood mitigation and erosion control. With climate change predicted to increase the frequency of extreme weather events, the value of mangroves and tidal marshes for reducing cyclone impacts is expected to grow. Though several studies have suggested that coastal wetlands reduce agricultural losses, this buffering effect is yet to be quantified. This research novelly evaluates coastal wetland buffering signals within a cyclone‐affected landscape. We assessed predictors of tropical cyclone impacts on agriculture to test the importance of coastal wetlands for mitigating storm damages. We used Random Forest models to analyse climatic, topographic and edaphic variables influencing crop cover (NDVI) and surface water presence (NDWI) in agricultural fields of the Whitsunday Coast before and after Tropical Cyclone Debbie, a Category 4 cyclone that made landfall in March 2017. Our analysis showed that croplands within 1 km of mangroves and tidal marshes experienced lower surface water presence and reduced crop cover declines compared with more distant areas. Surface water presence was strongly linked to crop cover loss, indicating complex interactions between wetland proximity, flooding and vegetation response. This study provides evidence for a potential buffering effect of wetlands that is spatially limited to within ~1 km of wetland areas, highlighting the indirect value of coastal wetlands to agricultural leaseholders in the Great Barrier Reef catchments and beyond. Our spatially explicit approach, based on freely available satellite data and machine learning models, demonstrates how remote sensing can reveal potential buffering signals of wetlands to inform identification of priority sites for wetland restoration and a preference for wetland restoration in land‐use planning for other cyclone‐prone regions. Synthesis and applications . Our findings provide novel evidence that wetlands can buffer storm impacts on agriculture, though only over short spatial ranges. The study highlights the importance of conserving and restoring coastal wetlands near croplands to enhance climate resilience. The approach can be applied in other regions where field monitoring is limited, offering a scalable tool to inform restoration planning, land‐use decisions and nature‐based strategies for managing extreme weather impacts. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog .
Rowland et al. (Sun,) studied this question.