An official website of the United States government
Built infrastructure, such as seawalls and levees, has long been used to reduce shoreline erosion and protect coastal properties from flood impacts. In contrast, natural and nature-based features (NNBF), including marshes, mangroves, oyster reefs, coral reefs, and seagrasses, offer not only coastal protection but also a range of valuable ecosystem services. There is no clear understanding of the capacity of either natural habitats or NNBF integrated with traditional engineered infrastructure to withstand extreme events, nor are there well-defined breakpoints at which these habitats fail to provide coastal protection. Evaluating existing NNBF strategies using a standardized set of metrics can help to assess their effectiveness to better inform design criteria. This review identifies a selection of NNBF projects with long-term monitoring programs and synthesizes the monitoring data to provide a literature-based performance assessment. It also explores the integration of NNBF with existing gray infrastructure to enhance overall effectiveness.
more »
« less
State of the practice and engineering framework for using emergent vegetation in coastal infrastructure
Natural and Nature-Based Features (NNBF) are promoted as alternatives to structural flood protection measures. Progress has been made in understanding the physics and engineering of these systems; however, engineering, ecological, and social barriers to implementation remain. This paper identifies these barriers using the results of a literature review and summary of expert opinion; contrasts the state of the practice of NNBF with traditional structures; and details the main engineering challenges to NNBF implementation, including the uncertainty in current calculation techniques and lack of engineering design guidelines. We suggest that emergent vegetation systems can be designed with the current body of information, and an example framework is proposed for assessing these systems for their wave attenuation performance. The framework is discussed in the context of risk, and future research priorities are presented.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10574088
- Publisher / Repository:
- Frontiers
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers in Built Environment
- Volume:
- 8
- ISSN:
- 2297-3362
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
National and many state standards require elementary teachers to teach engineering in their classrooms. However, incorporating engineering into elementary engineering classrooms has not been a standard practice, thus emphasizing the need for teachers to be provided with training, resources, and support for the vision of instruction described in the standards to become a reality. Administrators are responsible for making decisions regarding teacher training and support. In response, we explored the perceptions of division and building-level administrators throughout Virginia regarding the current state of elementary engineering education and what they perceive as barriers to their teachers engaging students in lessons that incorporate engineering practices. Our data comes from 11 questions from a multiple-choice and open-ended response survey, which was analyzed using a mixed-method approach. Findings describe incoherence between what administrators perceive as the current state of engineering education, the barriers to teachers engaging their students in engineering, and what supports are being provided to teachers. These findings have implications for professional development design and implementation.more » « less
-
Wave overtopping of shoreline infrastructure can lead to significant flooding and consequent loss of life, impairment of transportation systems, and ecological damage. Coastal defenses against overtopping traditionally include hard structures, such as seawalls and revetments, and design guidelines for these structures, e.g., the EurOtop manual (Van der Meer et al., 2018), have been developed from empirical studies of overtopping. Recently, natural and nature-based features (NNBF) including mangroves, wetlands, reefs, and other systems have gained attention as alternatives to conventional engineered coastal protection systems. Field observations have identified the potential of emergent vegetation, particularly mangrove forests, to mitigate damage during extreme coastal flood events (Alongi, 2008; Tomiczek et al., 2020). However, there is a lack of research on engineering NNBF systems to achieve specific design requirements for overtopping protection. Hybrid or multi-tiered approaches to shoreline protection have also been proposed, where natural (“green”) features are combined with hardened (“gray”) infrastructure to protect coastlines and near-coast assets from erosion and/or flood-based hazards. For overtopping mitigation, hybrid designs can add the performance provided by emergent vegetation to the services of a revetment or a wall. It is unknown whether the green and gray features in a hybrid system perform independently and can be considered as separate design elements, or if the inclusion of one feature affects the performance of the other such that the hybrid system must be considered as a single, complex design element. This study constructed a large-scale physical model to investigate the overtopping performance of a hybrid system with an idealized Rhizophora mangrove forest seaward of a revetment abutting a vertical wall compared to that performance of the wall fronted by the revetment only, the wall fronted by vegetation only, and the wall alone.more » « less
-
Schools and school districts are complex, dynamic systems affected by numerous factors, specific to the particular environment. These factors, which range from the stability of the home life of the enrolled children, to the interpersonal relationships of the school staff, to the funding decisions of the school board, to the laws passed by the U.S. Congress (and innumerable additional factors in between), all interact in sometimes predictable but often completely surprising ways. Educational initiatives and interventions that work well in one environment can prove completely ineffective (or un-implementable) in a different school setting, for a myriad of reasons. For university faculty and STEM professionals who partner with K-12 schools to implement and assess STEM educational reform initiatives, particularly for those who choose to work or scale up projects in non-charter or non-specialized lab school settings, the complexity of the system of K-12 education makes it difficult to identify all the potential barriers that can impact the proposed project. Unexpected factors can easily derail an otherwise well thought-out project, both in terms of project implementation and also in the success of assessing student outcomes. Educational researchers have long studied school reform and the issues of what facilitates and hinders success in curricular and other interventions. Experts in educational policy and public policy also have studied the interaction of policies and practices of reform agendas within social and organizational contexts. Industrial engineering, which had its origins in studying manufacturing systems, is a field where researchers have made great contributions towards understanding complex systems including transportation systems, financial systems, health care, and even recently humanitarian support systems. The Advanced Manufacturing and Prototyping Integrated to Unlock Potential (AMP-IT-UP) NSF Math/Science Partnership at the Georgia Institute of Technology is creating an innovative framework, which is both conceptual and theoretical and rooted within the field of industrial and systems engineering, to examine barriers and enablers to school change and reform. The framework describes the system in terms of both agents and the attributes of those agents and will become the foundation for identifying a subset of attribute combinations that allow for successful change in the system. In this paper we describe the first step in creating this framework, namely identifying the agents within K-12 education and the attributes of these agents that are critical to educational change. The paper also presents a sample scale for describing these attributes.more » « less
-
Sustainable Development Goal 6.4 aims to improve water-use efficiency and reduce water scarcity, yet its implementation is hampered by ambiguities in definitions, limitations in metrics, and misalignments between global indicators and local realities. This paper introduces the Engineering Diplomacy Framework (EDF) as a principled yet pragmatic approach to address these implementation challenges. Building on the Water Diplomacy Framework, EDF integrates engineering reasoning with diplomatic negotiation to reconcile quantitative indicators with contested social values and institutional complexity. We analyze SDG 6.4 using three metaphorical heuristics—“What is one plus one?”, “Where do we put the X?”, and “How do we divide 17 camels?”—to diagnose key gaps in current monitoring frameworks and uncover context-sensitive paths to action. Through comparative analysis of Singapore, Denmark, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Jordan, we show how EDF helps identify locally meaningful interventions where standardized metrics fall short. We conclude by outlining actionable steps for operationalizing EDF principles in SDG implementation, emphasizing the need to move beyond measurement toward negotiated, adaptive, and equitable solutions to achieve water sustainability goals. This manuscript introduces a novel decision-making framework—Engineering Diplomacy—that explicitly addresses ambiguity and contested values in the implementation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It offers actionable pathways toward more context-sensitive and politically feasible water governance.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3389/fbuil.2022.923965
