We are excited to announce that Profs. Steven Scyphers and Sharon Harlan were awarded a $300k grant from NOAA’s Adaptation Sciences (AdSci) program to study coastal adaptation decisions in Key West, Florida. Along with Scyphers and Harlan, the project team and partners include Dr. Randall Hughes from the Department of Marine & Environmental Sciences and collaborators from The Nature Conservancy, Florida Keys Outreach Coalition, Sea Grant US Naval Academy, NIST, and Michigan State University. The project builds on work that Kelsi Furman and Kiera O’Donnell have been doing post-Hurricane Irma. The study will use collaborative modeling, including the co-development of hypotheses and stakeholder engagement throughout the entire project, to assess the benefits, consequences, and trade-offs of coastal shoreline management decisions. The study context will focus on a “natural” to “built” gradient of mangrove, hybrid (mangrove + seawall), and seawall shorelines across spatial scales from patch to island, and across scales of human organization from individual residents to policy and governance.
