706 / 2024-09-19 09:40:51

The Stone Living Lab: Promoting Nature-Based Approaches for Shoreline Design as Sea-Level Rises in Boston Harbor and Beyond

Coastal Resilience, Nature-Based, Sea-level Rise

The Stone Living Lab is a broad partnership that conducts transformative research and innovative outreach to help promote the adoption of nature-based approaches toward coastal resilience to storms and sea-level rise. Located in Boston Harbor, an urban estuarine ecosystem whose watershed is home to nearly 2 million residents, the Stone Living Lab aims to be adaptive, diverse, and boundary spanning, thus fundamentally embracing nature-based approaches. With support from the Stone Foundation, a team with expertise in intertidal/subtidal biology, biogeochemistry, coastal geomorphology, engineering, modeling, policy, and community science is working together with a wide variety of stakeholders to promote coastal resilience literacy, to assess the success of Living Seawalls in urban environments, to adopt dynamic revetment approaches (cobble berms), and to integrate community youth art and design into planning processes. This all hands approach is necessary to address the urgent needs of coastal urban systems. This presentation will focus on the adaptive nature of the Lab as well as some strategies to share our research findings and nature-based approach with a diverse set of stakeholders.