Green Infrastructure Design for Shoreline Resilience

Application of robust green infrastructure design principles can improve success of efforts to restore ecosystem function to degraded, eroding shorelines. The health and stability of Florida’s estuarine shorelines are directly related to all three Florida Sea Grant priorities of water quality, sustainable fisheries and resilient coastal communities. The project will create a living shoreline prioritization model and hydrodynamic habitat suitability models for 240 miles (384 km) of estuarine shorelines in the Indian River and Lake Worth Lagoons. The shoreline models will address two questions often posed by coastal managers: 1) How should finite resources for shoreline stabilization or restoration be prioritized? and 2) How should a particular site be stabilized or restored? High-resolution field surveys will document shoreline ecotone characteristics and site-scale hydrodynamic conditions

will be assessed by long-term hydrodynamic modeling. Relationships between hydrodynamics and species distribution will be used to establish the hydrodynamic habitat limits of key ecosystem engineers applied in living shorelines (mangrove, oyster, marsh grasses, seagrasses). Spatial shoreline models will be constructed to prioritize shorelines in terms of geomorphic urgency for stabilization and inform which species and stabilization designs are likely to be robust to each site’s unique hydrodynamic and geomorphic conditions. The technology will be transferred to end-users in user-friendly formats for direct application to planning, design and engineering of green infrastructure in Indian River, Martin, St. Lucie and Palm Beach Counties. The project will advance diversity, equity and inclusion in each of the four participating counties by engaging at-risk youth and underserved communities in environmental education, accomplished through both direct involvement in shoreline assessment in the field and

classroom or virtual educational programming. Diverse end-user groups, including planners and coastal managers, shoreline stabilization practitioners, permitting agencies and the public, will benefit from cost savings, avoided costs, improved environmental decision-making and educational opportunities resulting from this research.