Iris | Flood & Coast

Innovative technologies and new evidence for nature based solutions to coastal challenges
Environmental and human pressures on our coastal environments are increasing steadily. Climate change itself and climate-related hazards are both affecting and being mitigated by coastal ecosystems and particularly vegetated intertidal foreshores. This presentation will introduce innovations in the fields of Earth Observation, Environmental Monitoring, Remote Sensing, Hydrodynamic Modelling, and Big Data, that, when joined together open up exciting new opportunities for coastal management decision making, particularly in the area of nature-based coastal protection.

The talk will introduce the latest scientific evidence for the efficiency with which salt marsh foreshores dissipate waves during storm surge conditions, as derived from a true-to-scale controlled experiment in the worlds longest wave flume in Hannover, Germany. The results from this experiment have been taken on board within the EU FP7 Foreshore Assessment using Space Technology(FAST) project, which combines this latest wave dissipation evidence with innovative ways of assessing and modelling the surface properties of European salt marshes and reed beds using the latest remote sensing technology.

Exciting new, affordable, repeatable, and updatable ways of collating information and visualising the value of nature based solutions towards the maintenance of natural capital, ecosystem services, and flood and erosion risk reduction are discussed.

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2019 Event Supporters:

Iris Moeller