This interdisciplinary project will investigate the social, ecological and engineering factors that contribute to coastal resilience and develop a framework for improved communication and informed decision making. The study aims to understand how social, ecological and engineering objectives for coastal shorelines are interlinked with the health of fisheries and fish habitats in order to develop a framework to improve social and ecological resilience. Study sites include Narragansett and Mobile Bays, which are both large, densely-populated estuarine embayments that have experienced dramatic declines in nearshore marine habitats. The research effort will 1) identify and model the fisheries consequences of shifts in habitat composition; 2) investigate the social, cultural and political factors that affect the sustainability of shoreline ecosystems, 3) assess the shoreline protection capacity and habitat complexity of wave-attenuating breakwaters; and 4) incorporate the social, ecological and engineering indices generated by the first three tasks into a decision-making framework. The project will involve collaboration between researchers and practitioners in the academic, government and private sectors, and include a variety of outreach activities to students and the public.
Understanding the complexity of factors related to resilience of human and natural communities is of high priority for those tasked with managing resources on a changing planet. In the past, most coastal conservation planning and prioritization has occurred without adequate knowledge or consideration of socio-cultural or engineering impacts. The goal of this research is to provide managers with decision support tools to enable restoration and sustainability efforts that maximize social capital.
This project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. With SEES Fellows support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish themselves in an independent research career related to sustainability.
