Transcript – Engineering with Nature: The Fusion of Coastal Engineering and Ecology

Hi, my name is Rachel Innocenti, and our poster today talks about engineering with nature, the fusion of coastal engineering and ecology. The last couple of years, we’ve been working on projects with the overall objective to explore the engineering with nature concept within the context of wave dune plant interactions. Engineering with nature fuses engineering and ecology disciplines to produce novel erosion solutions. One project we worked on looked at the lift forces and drag moments induced on plants by wind and run up energy. We tested coastal plants with different morphologies in a wind tunnel and a wave flume. We placed them in a forced sensor that we designed and constructed and found that different plant attributes predicted a plant’s physical response to win versus run up. Another project we were involved in was a collaborative project with Oregon State University and the University of Delaware. We constructed two dunes, a vegetated dune and a bare dune, and simulated hurricane hydrodynamics and measured their rates of erosion. We found that the vegetated dune formed a scarp faster than the bear dune. We hope that future analysis can help us understand how the vegetation interacts with the hydrodynamics in the sediments to cause this difference in erosion.