Physical and biological dynamic coastal processes and their role in coastal recovery (BLUEcoast)

UK Shoreline Management Plans provide a large-scale assessment of the risks associated with coastal processes to people and the built & natural environment. These policies need to be underpinned by robust scientific evidence.

BLUEcoast aims to enhance the coastal management evidence base. The project team are addressing unknowns in sediment dynamics due to overlapping processes in the water column, on and within the seabed, and at the water-land interface. Our research is focused on both physical and biological dynamic processes and their role in coastal recovery after storm events.

Using three distinct coastal types, which incorporate the range of conditions typically observed in temperate coasts, we aim to deliver improved scientific knowledge and enhanced modelling capability for dynamic coastal environments. The new knowledge and model capability developed will then be applied to deliver scenarios for two particularly challenging coastal locations.

Website: https://projects.noc.ac.uk/bluecoast

Principal Investigator: Dr Laurent Amoudry
Email: laou (at) noc.ac.uk

Project Dates:

May 2016 to January 2021

Funding:

NERC – Strategic Research

Project

Aim

BLUEcoast aims to inform coastal management by reducing uncertainties in the prediction of medium-term (years) and long-term (decadal and longer) regional sediment budgets, morphological change and how the coast recovers after sequences of storms.

Key questions are:

What is the role of sediment type (grain size, cohesiveness, lithology, biological characteristic) and coastal geomorphology on mediating coastal evolution?
Which processes dictate the crossshore and/or alongshore sediment fluxes of sediment from source to sink?
What role is played by biotic factors in the ecosystem and to what extend do biotic processes mediate coastal change or stability?
Which processes govern the recovery period of coastal systems?
What role is played by local and antecedent conditions?
How sensitive are coastal systems to changes in external forcings, including the sequencing and frequency and magnitude of extreme events, and including the confounding effect of human interventions?
How do biological and sedimentary factors combine to determine the resilience and tipping point of the system?
By engaging with key coastal practitioners, plans have been established to enable our new understanding to directly inform the update of guidance documents on model application for coastal management purposes.

People

NOC Staff involved:

Physical and biological dynamic coastal processes and their role in coastal recovery (BLUEcoast)

Project

Dr Laurent Amoudry

Prof. Jennifer Brown

Dr Richard Cooke

Geoff Hargreaves

Dr Megan Williams

Dr Xiaoyan Wei

Prof. Peter Thorne