Rahul Somvanshi
MIT,located in Cambridge, is a leading research institution in the USA. This institute of higher learning and innovation is always in the news for its innovative approach to research and its application in day-to-day life.
The latest study from MIT shows that protecting and enhancing salt marshes in front of protective sea walls can significantly help preserve some coastlines at a reasonable cost. The journal Communications Earth and Environment has published a research paper by MIT graduate student Ernie IH Lee and Prof of Civil and Environmental engineering Heidi Neptune. According to Nepf, this study shows that restoring coastal marshes “is not just something that would be nice to do, but it’s actually economically justifiable”.
The researchers found that the wave attenuating effects of salt marshes mean that the seawall behind it can be built at comparatively lower costs. It still provides as much protection from storms. Nepf says that it could be a relatively short marsh, just tens of meters wide, that can provide you benefits. Nepf is quite confident that it can make enough of a difference to be financially viable.
Lee says that previous studies on the subject “mainly focus on landscapes that have a wide marsh. But we want to show that it also applies in urban settings where not as much marsh land is available.” Computer modeling of waves was used for this study. Nepf says, “it’s a physics based model of plant-wave interaction, which allows us to look at the influence of plant species and changes in morphology across seasons”. Lee says, “We use a more concrete value to quantify the benefits of salt marshes, which is the equivalent height of seawall you would need to deliver the same protection value”.
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The researchers studied local salt marshes in Salem, Massachusetts, where projects are already underway to try to restore marshes that had been degraded. Lee is now developing a method to use drone imaging and machine learning to facilitate the mapmaking required for this purpose.
According to Nepf, this study is meeting the need to follow guidance for assessing the value of ecosystem services, issued by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Lee notes that their study shows how to quantify the environmental service values of marshes as per benefit-cost analysis (BCA) of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The MIT team has made available software that environmental engineers can apply to specific sites online for free on GitHub.
Professor Xiaoxia Zhang of Shenzhen University in China has said that the MIT study has presented a practical tool for translating the wave attenuation capabilities of marshes into economic values. According to him, the study shows that salt marshes are not only environmentally beneficial but also cost-effective. As per Prof Essar Bas Borsje of the Dutch University of Twente, “the most important step missing at the moment is how to translate our findings to the decision makers. This is the first time I’m aware that decision-makers are quantitatively informed on the protection value of salt marshes”.
The MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering-administered Schoettler Scholarship Fund supported Lee in this work. In short, the MIT study conducted by MIT graduate student Ernie IH Lee and Prof Of Civil and Environmental Engineering Heidi Nepf has provided cost-effective coastal protection solutions in their study, published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment. This study is worth applying to salt marshes spread across many coastal countries as it has shown a cost effective way of protecting the salty marshes.
