Along the coast of North Carolina and around the world, there is a delicate and dynamic balance between coastal ecosystems and communities. East Carolina University researchers are at the forefront of efforts to better understand those interactions and shape future policy and decision-making.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from ECU’s Department of Coastal Studies is involved in several grant-funded projects to document, explain and model how coastal ecosystems — such as mangrove swamps and coral reefs — act as a buffer against the impact of hurricanes and how the policies and decision-making of coastal communities affect those ecosystems.

Dr. Siddharth Narayan, assistant professor, is the principal investigator on a project funded by a $1.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation. ECU’s Dr. Nadine Heck and Dr. David Lagomasino are co-principal investigators on the project, along with Dr. Stacy Jupiter from the Wildlife Conservation Society and Dr. Manoochehr Shirzaei from Virginia Tech.

Circular interactions
The team is studying how mangrove and coral reef resource systems are shaped by external hurricane impacts and how they influence those impacts, Narayan said.

“When you think of a mangrove or reef system, it’s not just the mangroves and the coral reefs. It also includes the human communities that are using these mangroves and coral reefs and are often receiving flood protection benefits from them, and in some cases actively managing them for those flood protection benefits,” he said. “So humans are using and modifying these ecosystems. These ecosystems are dynamic in themselves. They interact with each other, they’re providing these benefits to humans, and then you have the impact of a hurricane that comes along and affects the ecosystem.

“It’s going to affect the mangroves and reefs. And it is also going to affect the coastal human communities, and so it is in that context that we’re trying to understand all of these links.”

​The connections are complex, he said, which is why the interdisciplinary nature of the coastal studies department, part of ECU Integrated Coastal Programs, is such a strength. Lagomasino brings expertise as a remote sensing ecologist, Narayan is a coastal engineer and Heck is a human environment geographer. The other partners bring additional expertise in such areas as flooding, community engagement and data collection, he said.

“Each of us has our own specific discipline, methods and expertise that we bring into this, and each of us has specific research questions,” Narayan said. “We have a framework within which we will bring all of us these insights together to see what storylines emerge.”

Previous work by the researchers has shown that losing coastal ecosystems such as mangroves, salt marsh wetlands and coral reefs means losing the protection they offer, and that communities need to take those ecosystems into consideration when rebuilding after storms.

The study will focus on vulnerable coastal communities in Fiji and Puerto Rico, said Heck. “We want to look at how people respond to (storms) in terms of how they manage, use and protect the mangroves and the coral reefs, and then we use that information to model how those decisions will affect the ability of the coral reefs and mangroves to (mitigate the impact of) future storms,” she said. “Because if I just cut them all down in order to rebuild my house, I’m going to have a lot less flood risk reduction in the future.”

One interesting aspect of Heck’s work is that the management of the coastal ecosystems is very different in Fiji versus Puerto Rico. “In Fiji, communities own their own lands and their own mangroves, so it’s more communal decision-making,” Heck said. “In Puerto Rico, it’s mostly governed by … national and state agencies. So we’ll look at that difference: How does it work in a more bottom-up, local governance environment versus a more top-down, government driven environment? So who makes the decisions about the mangroves, and does it matter in terms of how people respond?”

By better understanding the dynamics between coastal ecosystems and human beings, the team hopes to provide better information to decision-makers about coastal management.

“Our research will provide important insights into how decisions about managing coral reef and mangrove ecosystems differ across political systems, and how these decisions, in turn, influence the resilience of ecosystems and people to hurricane impacts,” Heck said. “These insights will help decision-makers identify ways in which mangroves and reefs can be managed to protect these ecosystems and enhance coastal resilience.”

East Carolina University’s Outer Banks Campus will host a disassembling event for a large art installation, “Was Here,” on Friday, October 7, 5 p.m.-6 p.m. Open to the public, the deinstallation will take place on the grounds of the Coastal Studies Institute in Wanchese, N.C. and will include an artist discussion, question and answer period and a reception.

“Was Here” is a collaboration between two ECU faculty members to study, illustrate and bring awareness to sea level change. David Lagomasino, assistant professor for the Department of Coastal Studies, and Gabe Duggan, assistant professor for the College of Fine Arts and Communication, said they worked with data to consider ways in which art might both respond to and challenge pre-existing science around the topic of sea level change.

The approximately 100-ft, three-dimensional piece offers three ways to view the experience: on the ground, from a higher floor inside the Institute and from images captured by drone or satellite. These three ways to view the piece represent how scientists receive data and study coastline changes and emphasize the importance of looking at an issue multiple ways.

Duggan said, “By documenting the [installation] process via real-time kinematic positioning (RTK), we’re tracking my movements in space to create the piece. We can then compare otherwise invisible patterns to the resulting work. My hope is that reflecting on this may offer some insight to parallel waxing-waning processes in nature, such as coastline removal and backfill.”

Lagomasino said, “We plan to continue to run further experiments to determine possible interactions between surface visibility, currents, and water levels. This work was just a steppingstone towards additional SciArt integration projects.”

The art installation was created referencing Coastal Studies Institute coastline maps from 1585, 1860 and 1950.

“Was Here” will be available for public viewing at the Coastal Studies Institute until Friday, October 7 when it will be removed in conjunction with Dare Arts’ First Friday series.

​PUBLISHED OCT 04, 2022 BY 

• KIM TILGHMAN

With a new grant from NASA, LSU and ECU scientists will track the impact of severe weather disturbances on the coastal wetlands and estuaries in Louisiana and Texas.BATON ROUGE –  A diverse array of ecosystems exist along the shores and in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, many of them well-documented by researchers. However, in the face of increased severe weather and the stressors brought on by climate change, it is becoming clear that more work needs to be done to understand how the Gulf functions as a single system.

Now, a new 3-year, $1.4 million grant from NASA will allow LSU and ECU researchers to embark on gaining a more holistic view of the western portion of the Gulf, in part by deploying a novel computer modeling approach, called coupled modeling.

Z. George Xue, an associate professor in LSU’s Department of Oceanography & Coastal Sciences, or DOCS, with a joint appointment at the Center for Computation and Technology, will be heading a research team that includes DOCS Associate Chair and Professor of Oceanography & Coastal Sciences Kanchan Maiti, as well as Xinping Hu of Texas A&M Corpus Christi and David Lagomasino of East Carolina University.

The scientists aim to paint the fullest picture yet of how coastal wetlands and estuaries in the western Gulf of Mexico are responding to the pressure of increasing severe, transient disturbances, such as hurricanes, tropical storms, and even inland flooding. Their research will focus on ecosystem resistance—an individual area’s ability to withstand disturbances--and resilience--how well it recovers after damage has occurred.

The project spans three very different sites. Researchers will work in the grasslands and wetlands of Louisiana’s Barataria Bay, the Texas coast’s more urbanized Galveston Bay and finally, Mission-Aransas Estuary, also off the coast of Texas and known for its aridity. Examining such a diverse array of ecosystems ensures they will get a systemic picture of how coastal ecosystems respond to extreme weather events and other disturbances.

Coupled Land-Ocean Modeling: A Novel Approach:
One of the central tasks of this project will be the further development of a novel coupled ocean hydrological model, an ambitious undertaking that Xue says may be among the first of its kind. Computer models of two separate systems—in this case, river water and other runoff from land, and ocean water—are paired and run at the same time, effectively allowing them to interact with each other just as systems in the natural world would. This coupling replicates the kinds of feedback that occurs between systems and results in a more accurate depiction of coastal processes, such as compound flooding.

It’s an approach Xue has used before. The model will be built on top the models created for a previous EPSCoR project co-funded by NASA and the Louisiana Board of Regents, to study carbon export from in the Mississippi Delta. These intensive modeling techniques demand so processing power, they not only have to be run on Louisiana’s High Performance Computing Facility, the state’s only supercomputer, but they have made Xue’s group the largest user of the facility in the state. His hope is to eventually build similar models for the rest of the Gulf of Mexico.    

“By applying and further developing the state-of-the-art compound flooding model, this project will significantly boost our understanding of the land-ocean interaction during extreme weather events like hurricanes and floods. The knowledge and technology gained from this project will benefit not only coastal Louisiana and Texas but also are transferable to other locations that are prone to coastal natural disasters,” Xue said.

-Story from LSU Media Center
​

While carbon is an essential element to life on Earth, carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere have significantly increased within the last two centuries due to anthropogenic activities such as deforestation and the use of fossil fuels or deforestation. This rise in emissions not only has a negative impact on coastal and marine organisms but has also expedited the rate at which the earth is currently experiencing climate change.

Interestingly, some environments known as wet carbon ecosystems have properties that allow them to sequester carbon, taking it from the atmosphere and storing it instead. While these systems’ characteristics help to mitigate climate change impacts, there are still many knowledge gaps that need to be addressed, and two ECU researchers are on the case. Drs. David Lagomasino, who leads the CSI’s Coasts & Oceans Observing Lab, and Sean Charles, a postdoctoral scholar at CSI, are co-authors on a recent publication in the journal Environmental Research Letters entitled, “A review of carbon monitoring in wet carbon systems using remote sensing”.

So, what are wet carbon systems? Wet carbon systems include a broad grouping of water-associated environments that store high quantities of carbon. They include all fresh, brackish, saline, and wetland ecosystems. Wet carbon systems often have overlapping characteristics as they pertain to restoration, preservation, and research. Understanding these systems as they relate to measuring carbon dioxide and methane emissions has become an increasingly popular task of scientists and remote sensing specialists. Specifically, they seek to provide data on carbon monitoring across local, regional, and global scales. Carbon cycle monitoring is an important part of working to achieve emissions reductions and other sustainability-related goals related.

When asked about the motivation for investigating wet carbon systems, Charles shared, “our team sought to expand on ‘blue carbon’ environments- wetlands, marshes, mangroves, and seagrass- to include other wet ecosystems that also store large amounts of carbon.”

As part of the newly published review for the NASA Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) program, Lagomasino and Charles reviewed nine separate wet carbon systems in order to analyze methods for measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) of the entire carbon cycle. To do this, their colleagues and they separated the nine wet carbon systems into three categories: coastal wetlands, inland wetlands, and ocean and shelves. A review of the literature on this topic revealed that the monitoring of wetlands using remote sensing has increased significantly over the last decade. So, what does that mean for stakeholders who hope to implement the use of this type of carbon monitoring in the coming years?
Stakeholders that might be interested in carbon monitoring range from cities to non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and other governing bodies. However, the inclusion of wet carbon systems in this assessment varies. The authors argue that while field-based methods of monitoring are sometimes difficult for wet carbon systems, remote sensing provides a promising prospect for MRV in these often inaccessible areas. In other words, although there is a need for an increase in wet carbon monitoring research, the authors believe that remote sensing research can help bridge gaps and has the potential to reduce uncertainty around these carbon estimates.

“[Wet carbon] ecosystems remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it, but quantifying and identifying changes in storage is essential for dealing with climate change,” shares Charles. “Remote sensing allows us to pinpoint changes across huge areas, even the entire world, over time.”

As Lagomasino put it, “Similar to how one monitors the money in their bank account, we are monitoring the amount of money, or carbon, going in and out of the system. This helps us identify where we might be losing, or gaining, that we which we may not know about.”

Following a model that has been implemented in oceanic carbon modeling, the researchers believe carbon mapping can be achieved across wet carbon systems as well. Lagomasino and Charles hope that the suggestions and recommendations the paper presents will help accelerate wet carbon monitoring and the role is it playing in major stakeholder decision-making.

“Combining remote sensing and field research can help scientists identify important carbon sinks to protect and promote their carbon sequestration, and identify vulnerable ecosystems to avoid the release of vast amounts of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere,” says Charles. “We hope our work can help mitigate climate change and protect and restore valuable ecosystems and the communities that rely on them.”

A new paper published by an East Carolina University researcher in the Department of Coastal Studies shines light on the effect human-made infrastructure and natural topography has on coastal wetlands after major storm events.  
In partnership with NASA and Florida International University, the study, led by assistant professor David Lagomasino, was published in the July edition of Nature Communications.  
Despite resilient grow back in the past, Lagomasino and his research team estimate that nearly 11,000 hectares of mangrove forest, about 27,000 acres, failed to regrow at their previous levels after Hurricane Irma.
The study focused on the effects of Hurricane Irma, which struck Florida in 2017, and the damage it caused to the state’s mangrove forests. The research team found that the forests suffered unparalleled dieback after the major hurricane.  
Mangrove forests are often damaged after hurricanes, but Lagomasino said forests in Florida have shown great resiliency in the past due to their structure, position and species composition. After Hurricane Irma, the forests did not rebound at the same rate. Nearly 11,000 hectares -- a space the size of more than 24,000 football fields -- showed evidence of complete dieback following the storm.  
For a resource that prevents more than $11 billion in annual property and flood damage in the state, that’s a major concern, Lagomasino said. 
“There have been significant storms in the past that have led to damage, but Irma seems to have caused one of the largest areas of dieback, at least in the satellite record,” Lagomasino said. 
After studying satellite and aerial footage of the region, the research team was able to pinpoint potential explanations for the dieback, including human-made obstacles. 
“Human-made obstacles, as well as natural changes in topography, can impact the flow of water through an area,” Lagomasino said. “Things like roads and levees can restrict or stop the flow of water between areas that were once connected. The lack of connection between the water can lead to extremes -- extreme dry conditions and extreme wet conditions, both of which can be stressful on wetland vegetation that thrives in more stable conditions.” 
The study noted that human-made barriers can lead to an increase in how long water stays on the surface, which can cause rapid degradation of fine root materials. Increased saltwater ponding may occur when storm surge is high and barriers obstruct water flow. 
These results are not only key for future storm planning in Florida, but other coastal states like North Carolina, Lagomasino said.
“What we have learned in Florida can be useful to North Carolina and other coastal regions,” Lagomasino said. “Our results indicate that the elevation of the landscape, the connectivity of water across the landscape, and the height of storm surge can indicate vulnerable areas. In other words, low elevation areas that are disconnected or do not have the capability to drain after being flooded are more susceptible to long-term damage.  
“This is useful for understanding the resilience of coastal forests and wetlands in North Carolina and may also be important in predicting urban areas that may also be less resilient to these extreme events.”  
The study suggested changes that can be made to improve coastal resiliency in the future when facing severe weather events, including: 

• Adding new metrics that account for storm surge and geology to the traditional hurricane rating system; 
• Establishing field research stations in low-lying areas to help identify underrepresented physical and biological processes in vulnerable regions; 
• Performing regular coastal remote sensing surveys to monitor drainage basins and improve water connectivity; and 
• Improving freshwater flow to help create new tidal channels. 

“We hope that the information from our research will help improve the recovery process after storms,” Lagomasino said. “If these areas can be identified ahead of time, then the disaster response can address issues in hard-hit areas much faster or minimize the impact beforehand. 
“The big takeaway here is that intense winds do a lot of damage during hurricanes. However, the intensity of damage does not necessarily coincide with the ability of the system to recover over time. Other factors, like slight changes in the elevation of the coastal landscape and storm surge, play a significant role in how the ecosystem recovers or does not recover after the initial damage. Having these factors in mind prior to hurricane season can help lessen long-term impacts in vulnerable communities.”  ​

PUBLISHED JUL 12, 2021 BY 

• MATT SMITH

Coastal seascapes (seagrasses, mangroves, coral reefs, tidal flats) are of high economic and ecological value all over the world and also offer extensive protection from extreme weather events. Coastal seascapes are often labeled “Blue Carbon” environments, meaning they are carbon-rich, water-related ecosystems that are able to store an abundance of carbon in their soils.  This ability to sequester carbon is a crucial characteristic for climate change mitigation. Despite such importance, these ecosystems are significantly understudied, especially in tropical and developing nations, as well as small island nations where the people disproportionately depend on coastal resources.

Fortunately, ECU Department of Coastal Studies assistant professor David Lagomasino is among those who have been awarded NASA funding for a project proposal entitled, “Using ICESat-2 data for Coastal Ecosystem Structure”. The project includes a mix of researchers from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the German Aerospace Center, and World Wild Fund-Germany. The team will utilize data from one of NASA’s newest satellites, the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat-2) to:

• estimate mangrove canopy height and tidal levels in coastal wetlands.
• provide shallow water bathymetry data for seagrass and coral reef mapping.
• produce maps of coastal zone ecosystem structure (including mangrove canopy heights, seagrass, and coral reefs) with associated uncertainty at target sites.

Areas of interest for the project include the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, Mozambique, Tanzania, Ecuador, Venezuela, Columbia, and French Guyana.

ICESat-2 is a satellite, which is able to provide elevation data by sending low-powered laser pulses toward Earth. Sensors on the satellite are able to collect what photons, or light particles, from the laser have been reflected from Earth, thus resulting in highly accurate elevation measurements. ICESat-2 was primarily developed for measuring the change in elevation of ice sheets and glaciers; however, the instrument uses a green laser that it is able to penetrate through the water to the seafloor, which can be translated into measurements of depth.

While it may seem weird for NASA, a space agency, to study the Earth, Lagomasino explained that NASA builds new technologies to explore far off planets and galaxies, but what better planet to study and test the instruments on than our own. The Earth facing NASA satellite fleet is advantageous for the project researchers as well as NASA space scientists. By using the satellite to better understand the Earth, it also can assist in identifying what is happening on other planets. It allows them to better understand their technology and look for ways to advance it. Because it proves to be a symbiotic relationship, NASA looks for opportunities to fund such earthly projects.

For this specific project, the team will combine data from ICESat-2 and other satellites to engineer new models for understanding the 3D structure of coastal seascapes. The extent and structure of the mangrove forests, seagrasses, and coral reefs are important for understanding the quality of the habitat for the creatures that live there, including us. Lagomasino says that the coastal models developed during this project will help us to regularly monitor shallow water coastal habitats and see how they will change over time – information that is critical for sustainably using our coastal resources.

​The project will also fund a new ECU PhD student in the new Integrated Coastal Sciences Program in the coming fall semester.