PhD Proposal Defense: Jana Haddad

The Ph.D. Proposal Defense of Jana Haddad is presented by the Department of Marine Sciences. This event will be held on Monday, February 8th, at 12:00 pm. The defense will be broadcast online via Zoom (Meeting ID: 974 4492 9417).

Title: Wave transformation in coastal marshes

Abstract: Amid increasing frequency and intensity of storms, there is a growing need for resilient shoreline protection strategies, especially those that can also provide ecological and economic benefits to coastal communities. Coastal marshes, whether restored, protected, or constructed as part of a living shoreline provide habitats that support seafood economies, improve water quality, and contribute to marsh accretion by trapping suspended sediments. The vegetation in these systems reduces erosion by attenuating wave energy. Though it is recognized that living shorelines attenuate waves, there remains a need for better understanding the interactions between the canopy and waves, and better ways of parametrizing these processes in wave models. This proposal aims to meet these needs using an energy-based wave model and a large range of wave observations made at natural marshes and living shorelines in coastal North Carolina. In completed work, observations of rms-wave properties were used with a one-dimensional cross shore wave model that accounts for time-averaged energy dissipation. The model was implemented to better understand how attenuation is influenced by wave and vegetation properties in a natural marsh. I propose to build on that work using both a wave-by-wave approach and a spectral approach applied to observations of waves made at natural marshes and living shorelines. A wave-by-wave approach will allow examining of patterns in dissipation that relate canopy drag with individual wave properties. By developing a spectral version of the wave model implemented in completed work, I will assess whether vegetation-induced dissipation in spectral models can be modified to better capture frequency-dependent wave dissipation. An important outcome of this work will be accurate predictions of wave attenuation across living shorelines, which will inform design and implementation of natural and nature-based shoreline protection strategies.