Presenter: Dr. Robert Twilley, Louisiana State University, Department of Oceanography & Coastal Sciences

Cost: Free!

When: Friday, April 1, 11:30 a.m.

Where: Zoom/Dalton J. Woods Auditorium; Energy, Coast and Environment Bldg.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 had a profound effect on coastal restoration planning in the Mississippi River Delta by focusing more on integrating regional planning with ecosystem services to reduce risks to coastal communities. These aspirations require systems thinking, design methodologies across disciplines, ecosystem performance analytics, and community collaboration. We developed the Collaborative Ecosystem Design (CED) framework to bring scientists, engineers, designers, and planners into a studio environment to achieve intentional change of landscape, infrastructure, and urban patterns to sustainably provide ecosystem services and address societal needs and values. The ecosystem design process aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones provides a common ground for researchers and practitioners to implement ecological and engineering principles into projects that positively affect landscape change. However ecosystem design requires ways to more quantitatively evaluate performance of ecosystem processes connected to ecosystem services into an ecological engineering principles. Several research projects will be demonstrated in our coastal ecosystem research lab that evaluate ecosystem performances such as carbon sequestration and flood risk reduction by mangroves, and nutrient mitigation and soil formation by coastal deltaic floodplains. Field experiments, unit modeling and global analysis are hierarchies of our research program to link ecosystem process with ecosystem performance to improve ecosystem designs.