Salt Marsh Restoration Projects

, and conserve salt marsh habitats as a part of the South Atlantic Salt Marsh Initiative. Currently, our team is leading several restoration projects in coastal Georgia to meet these goals. These projects use nature-based solutions to address community concerns such as flooding, erosion, and storm damage.

Nature-based solutions are techniques for addressing community threats such as erosion and flooding that blend local ecology and engineering. For example, using native plants in combination with well-draining soil and substrates integrates ecological and engineering principles to create rain gardens, or bioretention cells.

Other nature-based solutions include living shorelines, an alternative to bulkheads when fighting coastal erosion. In heavily eroded coastal areas, living shorelines can use natural materials like oyster shells, salt marsh vegetation, coir, and, in cases of heavy erosion, low-profile concrete materials that mimic nature to mitigate erosion and prevent future damage.

Nature-based solutions strengthen community resilience and benefit human and biological communities by preventing unnecessary loss of life and property, disruption of local economies, and damage to cultural heritage sites from storms or climate threats, re-connecting people with nature while improving community or property infrastructure, and improving water quality and habitat availability for important coastal flora and fauna.