[WAVES CRASHING]
Coastal erosion is the wearing away
of material along a shoreline.
And on the Virginia Eastern Shore,
this is driven primarily by waves,
and these waves are driven by storms.
[THUNDER]
[WIND CHIMES]
All storms bring waves, but it's actually your smaller storms,
your low-energy but more frequent storms, that
are driving waves that break immediately on the marsh edge
and eat away at the sediment there.
There's a lot of population growth
and valuable infrastructure along Virginia's Eastern Shore
that coastal landowners want to protect.
UVA's been working out here to characterize
marsh vulnerability to erosion and see what lines up to be
the most vulnerable shoreline.
We see seawalls, we see bulkheads,
but there are several trade-offs associated
with hardened structures.
When waves come in and hit those hardened structures,
they reflect off of that.
And that energy tends to scour out
the bottom making the water in front of your structure even
deeper, and that deeper water actually allows
more and more wave energy to approach the shoreline.
So we have to come up with other solutions.
Living Shorelines are a nature-based shoreline
stabilization technique that's designed
to control erosion while maintaining ecosystem
functions.
They're made of materials like natural vegetation,
artificial oyster reefs.
The oyster reef takes away energy from the wave
and causes its height to decrease impacting with less
energy, causing less erosion.
The Nature Conservancy and the University of Virginia
work together to try to get the best information
to the coastal communities offering shoreline
stabilization recommendations so that they're more resilient
and can better adapt to coastal hazards.
Having these reefs here helps to make the edge of our marsh
more resilient and by having these big wide healthy marshes,
they can help to make our communities more resilient.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
There are a ton of people who are relying
on the Chesapeake Bay and the Eastern Shore
for their livelihood.
And I know that my science will have
an impact on the coastal community
here at the Virginia Eastern Shore.
To be able to serve them in this way,
I feel very proud to be a part of the effort.
[MUSIC PLAYING]