Cooperative Agreement for CESU-affiliated Partner with North Atlantic Coast Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit

The USGS is offering a funding opportunity to a CESU partner for research to investigate the sediment transport in tidal marsh areas due to the combined effects of storm surge and waves. In many coastal areas there has been a tremendous loss of wetland areas and this has greatly reduced the ability to absorb increased urban runoff and lessen the impacts from larger waves during storm events. The watershed and estuary of Jamaica Bay region has been drastically altered over the last century. Recent wetland restorations aim to restore ecological function and to create living shorelines that will help reduce storm surge impacts. The long-term sustainability of the both the remaining wetlands and the restoration sites and their efficacy for mitigating storm surge depend on whether the sediment supply to the marshes is sufficient to keep pace with sea level rise.  This effort aims to use realistic hydrodynamic and sediment transport modeling to assess the sediment transport under a range of storm forcing conditions, and to understand how the spatial patterns in the wetland distributions affect storm surge and wave height distributions around Jamaica Bay.