Coastal resilience over time: Feedbacks between coastal ecosystems, cyclone activity, and coastal protection benefits

NASA released its first ever Coastal Resilience Request for Proposal in 2022, with the goal to "goal of this solicitation is to advance our understanding of key physical, biological, biogeochemical, geological, and hydrological coastal processes and their interactions within the interface of the ocean-land-human system, and to enhance our understanding of how these processes will be compounded in rapidly changing coastal environments".  Our project team was particularly suited for this solicitation because of years of experience in mapping unique coastal landscape properties using satellite imagery and modeling of coastal hydrodynamics.  For this project Lagomasino teams up with Dr. Sid Narayan (ECU Integrated Coastal Programs) and Dr. Lola Fatoyinbo (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) and her team, to develop improved predictions of the most-rapidly changing coastal processes (ie., coastal habitat loss and coastal urban expansion), while quantifying how compounded disturbances from sea level rise and cyclone flooding have altered coastal resilience over the past several decades.

The team will use unique NASA satellites datasets that can observe coastal land cover and penetrate the coastal ocean to create new models of change processes and bathymetry. These two pieces of information are critical in the accurate model of flood protection benefits (see Narayan Lab). With all of this data working together, we will be able to pinpoint coastal regions across the Caribbean that may be more vulnerable to storm-driven flooding because of geomorphological, ecological, and social factors. 
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We will be updating this page with regular milestones over the course of the project. Stay tuned. 
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Our project framework highlighting the major objectives and how satellite and hydrodynamic modeling fit together.