Kelly A. Burks-Copes

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.

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.

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.

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: 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.