For nearly a century, the O’Shaughnessy seawall has held back the sand and seas of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. At work even longer: the Galveston seawall, built after America’s deadliest hurricane in 1900 killed thousands in Texas.
For nearly a century, the O’Shaughnessy seawall has held back the sand and seas of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. At work even longer: the Galveston seawall, built after America’s deadliest hurricane in 1900 killed thousands in Texas.
These are just two examples of how America’s coasts — particularly those with large urban populations — have been armored with man-made structures.
These structures essentially draw a line in the sand that constrains the ability of the shoreline to respond to changes in sea level and other dynamic coastal processes. While the resulting ecological effects have been studied more in recent years, the research largely has been conducted in specific settings, making it difficult to generalize these effects across ecosystems and structure types.
A new study by a team of UC Santa Barbara marine scientists and colleagues from three coastal sites in the National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network provides a key first step toward generalizing ecological responses to armoring across the wide diversity of coastal settings where these structures are used. The team’s findings appear online and will be published this fall in a special issue of the journal Estuaries and Coasts, “Impacts of Coastal Land Use and Shoreline Armoring on Estuarine Ecosystems.”
Read more at University of California - Santa Barbara
Image: Waves wash into this seawall at every high tide in Summerland, California. (Credit: Jenny Dugan, UCSB)
