The compartment-and-arrow model below shows a reconfiguration of the Montague & Wiegert model of flow of marshgrass photosynthate into the marsh foodweb. Previously, the model showed 90% of the marshgrass flux going to bacteria and fungi in the surface microlayer. This reconfiguration, published in the "Concepts and Controversies" marsh book, emphasizes that the standing-dead compartment, above the surface mud, is a very important transition box between the living shoots and particle movement into the surface microlayer. See Montague & Wiegert, 1990, Salt marshes, pp. 481-516, In Myers & Ewel (eds), Ecosystems of Florida, Univ. Central FL Press, Orlando; Newell & Porter, 2000, Microbial secondary production from saltmarsh-grass shoots, and its known and potential fates, pp. 159-185, In Weinstein & Kreeger (eds), Concepts and controversies in tidal marsh ecology, Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht; Newell, 2001, Multiyear patterns of fungal-biomass dynamics and productivity within naturally decaying smooth-cordgrass shoots, Limnol. Oceanogr. 46:573-583.