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Kelly A. Burks-Copes

Bio: Kelly A. Burks-Copes is an academic researcher from Engineer Research and Development Center. The author has contributed to research in topics: Breakwater & Storm. The author has an hindex of 4, co-authored 5 publications receiving 301 citations.

Papers
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Journal ArticleDOI
02 May 2016-PLOS ONE
TL;DR: The comparison of costs of nature-based defence projects and engineering structures show that salt-marshes and mangroves can be two to five times cheaper than a submerged breakwater for wave heights up to half a metre and, within their limits, become more cost effective at greater depths.
Abstract: There is great interest in the restoration and conservation of coastal habitats for protection from flooding and erosion. This is evidenced by the growing number of analyses and reviews of the effectiveness of habitats as natural defences and increasing funding world-wide for nature-based defences-i.e. restoration projects aimed at coastal protection; yet, there is no synthetic information on what kinds of projects are effective and cost effective for this purpose. This paper addresses two issues critical for designing restoration projects for coastal protection: (i) a synthesis of the costs and benefits of projects designed for coastal protection (nature-based defences) and (ii) analyses of the effectiveness of coastal habitats (natural defences) in reducing wave heights and the biophysical parameters that influence this effectiveness. We (i) analyse data from sixty-nine field measurements in coastal habitats globally and examine measures of effectiveness of mangroves, salt-marshes, coral reefs and seagrass/kelp beds for wave height reduction; (ii) synthesise the costs and coastal protection benefits of fifty-two nature-based defence projects and; (iii) estimate the benefits of each restoration project by combining information on restoration costs with data from nearby field measurements. The analyses of field measurements show that coastal habitats have significant potential for reducing wave heights that varies by habitat and site. In general, coral reefs and salt-marshes have the highest overall potential. Habitat effectiveness is influenced by: a) the ratios of wave height-to-water depth and habitat width-to-wavelength in coral reefs; and b) the ratio of vegetation height-to-water depth in salt-marshes. The comparison of costs of nature-based defence projects and engineering structures show that salt-marshes and mangroves can be two to five times cheaper than a submerged breakwater for wave heights up to half a metre and, within their limits, become more cost effective at greater depths. Nature-based defence projects also report benefits ranging from reductions in storm damage to reductions in coastal structure costs.

392 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Li et al. as mentioned in this paper used hydrodynamic and sediment transport modeling system validated with measured water levels from Hurricane Isabel to simulate two synthesized storms representing 50-year and 100-year return-period hurricanes, a northeaster, and five future RSLR scenarios to evaluate the combined impacts of inundation on this military installation in the lower Chesapeake Bay.
Abstract: Li, H.; Lin, L., and Burks-Copes, K.A., 2013. Modeling of coastal inundation, storm surge, and relative sea-level rise at Naval Station Norfolk, Norfolk, Virginia, U.S.A. The potential risk and effects of storm-surge damage caused by the combination of hurricane-force waves, tides, and relative sea-level-rise (RSLR) scenarios were examined at the U.S. Naval Station, Norfolk, Virginia. A hydrodynamic and sediment transport modeling system validated with measured water levels from Hurricane Isabel was used to simulate two synthesized storms representing 50-year and 100-year return-period hurricanes, a northeaster, and five future RSLR scenarios to evaluate the combined impacts of inundation on this military installation in the lower Chesapeake Bay. The naval base topography and nearshore water body of Hampton Roads were included in the coastal modeling system (CMS), a suite of surge, circulation, wave, sediment transport, and morphology evolution models. The modeling domain was a rectangular area c...

21 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Performance metrics were collected to capture the benefits of strategic placement of dredged material in river systems to allow formation of islands that produce a wide array of ESs and can be converted to ESs with market value or combined in a decision analytical approach to demonstrate the relative gain in utility.
Abstract: The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) operates and maintains numerous projects in support of its various civil works missions including flood damage risk reduction, navigation, and ecosystem restoration. Originally authorized on an economic basis, these projects may produce a broad array of unaccounted for ecosystem services (ESs) that contribute to overall human, societal, and environmental well-being. Efforts are underway to capture the full array of environmental, economic, and social impacts of these projects. Methods are needed to identify relevant ESs generated by these nature-based projects and to measure their contribution to societal well-being with an emphasis placed on use of readily available data. Performance metrics were collected to capture the benefits of strategic placement of dredged material in river systems to allow formation of islands that produce a wide array of ESs. These performance metrics can be converted to ESs with market value or combined in a decision analytical approach to demonstrate the relative gain in utility. This approach is demonstrated on a riverine island created on the Atchafalaya River, Louisiana, as a result of the strategic placement of dredged material. The outcomes foster integration of ES assessment into project design and management practices and support more comprehensive project evaluation and widespread application. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2018;14:759-768. Published 2018. This article is a US Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.

6 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article , the authors examine three innovative coastal resilience projects that use NNBF approaches to improve coastal community resilience to flooding while providing a host of other benefits: Living Breakwaters in New York Harbor, the Coastal Texas Protection and Restoration Study, and the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project in San Francisco Bay.
Abstract: Coastal communities around the world are facing increased coastal flooding and shoreline erosion from factors such as sea-level rise and unsustainable development practices. Coastal engineers and managers often rely on gray infrastructure such as seawalls, levees and breakwaters, but are increasingly seeking to incorporate more sustainable natural and nature-based features (NNBF). While coastal restoration projects have been happening for decades, NNBF projects go above and beyond coastal restoration. They seek to provide communities with coastal protection from storms, erosion, and/or flooding while also providing some of the other natural benefits that restored habitats provide. Yet there remain many unknowns about how to design and implement these projects. This study examines three innovative coastal resilience projects that use NNBF approaches to improve coastal community resilience to flooding while providing a host of other benefits: 1) Living Breakwaters in New York Harbor; 2) the Coastal Texas Protection and Restoration Study; and 3) the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project in San Francisco Bay. We synthesize findings from these case studies to report areas of progress and illustrate remaining challenges. All three case studies began with innovative project funding and framing that enabled expansion beyond a sole focus on flood risk reduction to include multiple functions and benefits. Each project involved stakeholder engagement and incorporated feedback into the design process. In the Texas case study this dramatically shifted one part of the project design from a more traditional, gray approach to a more natural hybrid solution. We also identified common challenges related to permitting and funding, which often arise as a consequence of uncertainties in performance and long-term sustainability for diverse NNBF approaches. The Living Breakwaters project is helping to address these uncertainties by using detailed computational and physical modeling and a variety of experimental morphologies to help facilitate learning while monitoring future performance. This paper informs and improves future sustainable coastal resilience projects by learning from these past innovations, highlighting the need for integrated and robust monitoring plans for projects after implementation, and emphasizing the critical role of stakeholder engagement.

5 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Abstract: Unintended consequences arising from the damming and regulation of large multi-state river systems have generated complex socioecological conflicts that must now be addressed to facilitate ecosystem-based management in a holistic, sustainable, and resilient fashion. In these situations, the involvement of numerous stakeholders with disparate and often conflicting values, mindsets, and agendas generate a dynamic decision-making environment riddled with critical knowledge gaps, teeming with uncertainty, and driven by high stakes negotiations perpetuated by a sense of institutional urgency to embrace quick fixes. The system complexity calls for a transparent and prescriptive approach grounded in creative problem solving, transformative design, and collaborative adaptive management. Here, a spiral-based approach to ecosystem modeling is presented emphasizing system conceptualization while encouraging reflection, active learning, and hypothesis-driven monitoring. A case study on the Missouri River focuses on the development of a conceptual model for the cottonwood forest community lining the banks of this highly regulated river system. Between 2006 and 2010, eighty local stakeholders were engaged in six, week-long interactive workshops to integrate their existing knowledge of the cottonwood ecosystems and to synthesize this information into critical drivers, stressors, and valued ecosystem components using conceptual diagramming and tabular crosswalks. The final product has exposed clear lines of evidence tying essential ecosystem responses to measureable endpoints that are now being used to establish performance measures for both alternative comparisons and adaptive management thresholds that will trigger future management responses.

4 citations


Cited by
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Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Daniela Jacob, Marco Bindi, Sally Brown, I. A. Camilloni, Arona Diedhiou, Riyanti Djalante, Kristie L. Ebi1, Francois Engelbrecht1, Joel Guiot, Yasuaki Hijioka, S. Mehrotra, Antony J. Payne2, Sonia I. Seneviratne3, Adelle Thomas3, Rachel Warren4, G. Zhou4, Sharina Abdul Halim, Michelle Achlatis, Lisa V. Alexander, Myles R. Allen, Peter Berry, Christopher Boyer, Edward Byers, Lorenzo Brilli, Marcos Silveira Buckeridge, William W. L. Cheung, Marlies Craig, Neville Ellis, Jason P. Evans, Hubertus Fischer, Klaus Fraedrich, Sabine Fuss, Anjani Ganase, Jean-Pierre Gattuso, Peter Greve, Tania Guillén Bolaños, Naota Hanasaki, Tomoko Hasegawa, Katie Hayes, Annette L. Hirsch, Chris D. Jones, Thomas Jung, Markku Kanninen, Gerhard Krinner, David M. Lawrence, Timothy M. Lenton, Debora Ley, Diana Liverman, Natalie M. Mahowald, Kathleen L. McInnes, Katrin J. Meissner, Richard J. Millar, Katja Mintenbeck, Daniel M. Mitchell, Alan C. Mix, Dirk Notz, Leonard Nurse, Andrew Emmanuel Okem, Lennart Olsson, Michael Oppenheimer, Shlomit Paz, Juliane Petersen, Jan Petzold, Swantje Preuschmann, Mohammad Feisal Rahman, Joeri Rogelj, Hanna Scheuffele, Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, Daniel Scott, Roland Séférian, Jana Sillmann, Chandni Singh, Raphael Slade, Kimberly Stephenson, Tannecia S. Stephenson, Mouhamadou Bamba Sylla, Mark Tebboth, Petra Tschakert, Robert Vautard, Richard Wartenburger, Michael Wehner, Nora Marie Weyer, Felicia S. Whyte, Gary W. Yohe, Xuebin Zhang, Robert B. Zougmoré 
01 Jan 2018
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a survey of women's sportswriters in South Africa and Ivory Coast, including: Marco Bindi (Italy), Sally Brown (UK), Ines Camilloni (Argentina), Arona Diedhiou (Ivory Coast/Senegal), Riyanti Djalante (Japan/Indonesia), Kristie L. Ebi (USA), Francois Engelbrecht (South Africa), Joel Guiot (France), Yasuaki Hijioka (Japan), Shagun Mehrotra (USA/India), Ant
Abstract: Lead Authors: Marco Bindi (Italy), Sally Brown (UK), Ines Camilloni (Argentina), Arona Diedhiou (Ivory Coast/Senegal), Riyanti Djalante (Japan/Indonesia), Kristie L. Ebi (USA), Francois Engelbrecht (South Africa), Joel Guiot (France), Yasuaki Hijioka (Japan), Shagun Mehrotra (USA/India), Antony Payne (UK), Sonia I. Seneviratne (Switzerland), Adelle Thomas (Bahamas), Rachel Warren (UK), Guangsheng Zhou (China)

614 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors show that the annual damages from flooding would double globally without reefs and they quantify where reefs provide the most protection to people and property.
Abstract: Coral reefs can provide significant coastal protection benefits to people and property. Here we show that the annual expected damages from flooding would double, and costs from frequent storms would triple without reefs. For 100-year storm events, flood damages would increase by 91% to $US 272 billion without reefs. The countries with the most to gain from reef management are Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Mexico, and Cuba; annual expected flood savings exceed $400 M for each of these nations. Sea-level rise will increase flood risk, but substantial impacts could happen from reef loss alone without better near-term management. We provide a global, process-based valuation of an ecosystem service across an entire marine biome at (sub)national levels. These spatially explicit benefits inform critical risk and environmental management decisions, and the expected benefits can be directly considered by governments (e.g., national accounts, recovery plans) and businesses (e.g., insurance). Coral reefs provide significant coastal protection from storms but they have experienced significant losses. Here the authors show that the annual damages from flooding would double globally without reefs and they quantify where reefs provide the most protection to people and property.

586 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The rise of NbS in climate policy is highlighted—focusing on their potential for climate change adaptation as well as mitigation—and barriers to their evidence-based implementation are discussed, highlighting avenues for further research.
Abstract: There is growing awareness that ‘nature-based solutions' (NbS) can help to protect us from climate change impacts while slowing further warming, supporting biodiversity and securing ecosystem servi...

533 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors identify the top-ten unresolved questions in the field and find that most questions relate to the precise role blue carbon can play in mitigating climate change and the most effective management actions in maximising this.
Abstract: The term Blue Carbon (BC) was first coined a decade ago to describe the disproportionately large contribution of coastal vegetated ecosystems to global carbon sequestration. The role of BC in climate change mitigation and adaptation has now reached international prominence. To help prioritise future research, we assembled leading experts in the field to agree upon the top-ten pending questions in BC science. Understanding how climate change affects carbon accumulation in mature BC ecosystems and during their restoration was a high priority. Controversial questions included the role of carbonate and macroalgae in BC cycling, and the degree to which greenhouse gases are released following disturbance of BC ecosystems. Scientists seek improved precision of the extent of BC ecosystems; techniques to determine BC provenance; understanding of the factors that influence sequestration in BC ecosystems, with the corresponding value of BC; and the management actions that are effective in enhancing this value. Overall this overview provides a comprehensive road map for the coming decades on future research in BC science.

424 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is concluded that marine reserves are a viable low-tech, cost-effective adaptation strategy that would yield multiple cobenefits from local to global scales, improving the outlook for the environment and people into the future.
Abstract: Strong decreases in greenhouse gas emissions are required to meet the reduction trajectory resolved within the 2015 Paris Agreement. However, even these decreases will not avert serious stress and damage to life on Earth, and additional steps are needed to boost the resilience of ecosystems, safeguard their wildlife, and protect their capacity to supply vital goods and services. We discuss how well-managed marine reserves may help marine ecosystems and people adapt to five prominent impacts of climate change: acidification, sea-level rise, intensification of storms, shifts in species distribution, and decreased productivity and oxygen availability, as well as their cumulative effects. We explore the role of managed ecosystems in mitigating climate change by promoting carbon sequestration and storage and by buffering against uncertainty in management, environmental fluctuations, directional change, and extreme events. We highlight both strengths and limitations and conclude that marine reserves are a viable low-tech, cost-effective adaptation strategy that would yield multiple cobenefits from local to global scales, improving the outlook for the environment and people into the future.

403 citations