By Jenny P. Shinn, Field Researcher, Haskin Shellfish Research Laboratory, Rutgers University
In the art world, individual tiles of glass or stone combine to create mosaics that are strong and beautiful. At Tyndall Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle, a mosaic of methods, materials, and expertise created an elegant solution to coastal erosion.
This innovative solution is the culmination of more than three years of research, design and planning by an interdisciplinary team of scientists from 11 institutions across the U.S. and Australia, led by former PDE Board Member Dave Bushek, Ph.D., director and professor at Rutgers University’s Haskin Shellfish Research Laboratory (HSRL).
Answering a Crisis
A few years after Hurricane Michael devastated much of the base and the Panhandle in 2018, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency developed the Reefense program to rapidly advance living shoreline technologies by integrating materials science, structural engineering, shellfish breeding, and ecological engineering to mitigate coastal flooding and erosion threatening civilian and military infrastructure. The Rutgers team that included PDE was one of three selected.
A Mosaic of Minds
The assembled team consisted of, biologists, ecologists, engineers, economists, and artists from Louisiana, Mississippi, Arizona, Alabama, Florida, New Jersey, Delaware, and Australia. Ecologists like PDE’s Urban Resilience Assistant Manager Ella Rothermel and Estuary Science Assistant Manager Leah Morgan gained perspectives on material design and construction from engineers while engineers learned about reef-forming organisms. Economists tracked costs and benefits, and an industrial artist ensured aesthetics.
“This is the first living shoreline project I’ve worked on that had engineers from multiple fields directly involved with the entire project from planning to design, to monitoring,” said HSRL Field Researcher Jenny Shinn, who worked on the project from its 2021 inception. “Their expertise was extremely valuable and collaborating with such a diverse team has made me a stronger scientist.”
Together, the group employed a Living Shoreline MosaicTM strategy, which creates a seascape of interconnected habitats supporting processes that increase shoreline resilience.
Conceptualized more than a decade ago by the late Danielle Kreeger, Ph.D., PDE and HSRL piloted the approach in 2008 and refined it at more than 15 living shorelines between Delaware and New Jersey.
“Reefense provided a unique opportunity to flesh out and field test the mosaic concept,” said Bushek, who with former PDE scientist Joshua Moody, Ph.D., helped develop it with Kreeger.
The installation at Tyndall deployed nearly 800, 2-foot high Reefense ModulesTM, creating a breakwater seeded with thousands of disease-resistant local oysters. Half-scale modules and 1,500 bags of recycled oyster shells created smaller patch reefs behind the breakwater, and 2,000 marsh plants fortified the shoreline to create a final transition to upland habitats.
One year later, organisms have arrived as the Living Shoreline Mosaic slows waves, captures sediment, and provides habitat. Protective benefits should increase over the next several years as the habitats develop and strengthen into a resilient shoreline.
Project Reefense will live on as a research collaborative of partner institutions seeking opportunities to implement and study living shoreline mosaics across the globe. The approach is garnering interest across coastal communities — a mosaic of expertise in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Original article at ISSUU