Coastal resilience over time: Feedbacks between coastal ecosystems, cyclone activity, and coastal protection benefits

David Lagomasino,  East Carolina University,  lagomasinod19@ecu.edu (Presenter)
Temilola E. Fatoyinbo,  NASA GSFC,  lola.fatoyinbo@nasa.gov
Siddharth Narayan,  East Carolina University,  narayans19@ecu.edu
Anthony Daniel Campbell,  NASA GSFC / UMBC,  anthony.d.campbell@nasa.gov
Nathan Marc Thomas,  NASA GSFC / ESSIC UMD,  nathan.m.thomas@nasa.gov

The projected increases in tropical cyclone damage are concentrated in North America, the Caribbean, Central America, and East Asia. Coastal wetlands, including mangroves and tidal marshes provide coastal protection in multiple ways, including wave attenuation, and flood mitigation, resulting in reduced economic loss from hurricanes and cyclones. Currently, coastal wetlands provide flood mitigation to ~30% of the flood-exposed coastal plain. These environments also store disproportionately more carbon than per hectare than most other landscapes, and function as Natural Infrastructure (NI) that help to reduce coastal hazards and improve coastal resilience. However, storm events also cause habitat losses, especially in already stressed areas. There is a strong consensus that these Blue Carbon and coastal ecosystems are critical for maintaining coastal resilience and their importance has been explicitly mentioned in national and global reports. But, many of the hydrodynamics models used to derive coastal exposure or risk rely on outdated extent maps and coarse-scale bathymetry, critical components in accurate modeling. Furthermore, without considering how human and natural changes to coastal ecosystems enhance or degrade coastal resilience, these models overlook a critical measure of causal interaction. Therefore, if we link the state-of-the-art remote sensing-based models of coastal ecosystem status and change with the cutting edge hydrodynamics models, we can better understand the dynamic coupling of key processes that influence coastal resilience within the Ocean-Coast-Land interface.

These coupled coastal change processes necessitate novel methods and new data to understand the changing vulnerability of coastal populations and infrastructure. Cutting-edge hydrodynamic models developed by our team have quantified the benefits of these coastal ecosystems, and more specifically the role that marshes and mangroves play in reducing cyclone related flooding, economic impact, and loss of human livelihoods. We will model the interactions of socioecological, geomorphological, and ocean processes with an applied engineering framework. This will allow us to attribute increases or decreases in coastal risk to specific proximate drivers of anthropogenic and natural gains or losses,

Poster Location ID: 1-29

Presentation Type: Poster

Session: Poster Session 1

Session Date: Tue (May 9) 5:00-7:00 PM

CCE Program: OBB