Item talk:Q227321

{

 "@context": "http://schema.org/",
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 "additionalType": "Event",
 "url": "https://www.usgs.gov/centers/pcmsc/science/science-seminar-series",
 "headline": "Science Seminar Series",
 "datePublished": "June 7, 2022",
 "author": [
   {
     "@type": "Person",
     "name": "Peter L. Pearsall",
     "url": "https://www.usgs.gov/staff-profiles/peter-l-pearsall",
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       "value": "0000-0002-4566-8026"
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 ],
 "description": [
   {
     "@type": "TextObject",
     "text": "Protecting the interests of individuals, communities, and the natural environment along the coasts from the impacts of relative sea level rise is essential. The consequences of these impacts are often elusive, particularly when trying to quantify them on a larger scale, such as the entire U.S. coasts. Tracing environmental changes from a local to a global scale over several decades is increasingly fulfilled by Earth Observing (EO) satellites, in particular, radar imaging instruments.Dr. Shirzaei will discuss recent advances in modern multitemporal Interferometric SAR algorithms for monitoring coastal environments. Next, he will present examples demonstrating the value of high-resolution Radar EO satellite data for mapping vertical land motion with implications for relative sea-level rise, flooding hazards, wetland vulnerabilities, and asset management along the U.S. coasts. The findings suggest that by 2050, a total land area between 1,006 and 1,389 km2 will be lost, and 55,000\u2013273,000 people will be displaced from about 31,000\u2013171,000 properties. Also, about 50% of infrastructures, such as roads, railways, airports, dams, and levees in major cities such as New York, Baltimore, and Norfolk, are subject to subsidence rates of more than 1 mm/year. Additionally, 58 to 100% of East Coast marshes are losing elevation relative to sea level.These case studies highlight EO satellite data's importance for developing management, adaptation, and resilience plans promoting coastal environmental justice and security."
   },
   {
     "@type": "TextObject",
     "text": "Sea-level rise will increase the frequency and severity of coastal flooding events. Even minor water level increases will propagate wave energy landward, promote coastal erosion and, in turn, jeopardize backshore infrastructure. Critical infrastructure requires evolving coastal management and advanced engineering designs to facilitate long-term urban coastal realignment compatible with rising seas. Traditional coastal engineering uses hard infrastructure such as seawalls and revetments to protect urbanized backshores. Infrastructure failure during extreme water levels leads to catastrophic human and economic consequences. Evolving,nature-inspired features such as living shorelines and artificial dunes present an attractive hardscape alternative. Although dune erosion modeling is prevalent in the literature, there is a paucity of information regarding the construction, design and efficacy of the hybrid dune counterparts, especially on energetic, wave-dominated coastlines (e.g., Pacific). The objective of this research is to advance nature-based coastal engineering through high-resolution spatiotemporal observations and numerical modeling."
   },
   {
     "@type": "TextObject",
     "text": "Welcome to the Pacific Coastal Marine Science Center (PCMSC) Seminar Series! Our seminars are on the first and third Tuesday of every month, usually from 10:00 \u2013 11:00 am Pacific Time (1:00 - 2:00 pm Eastern) via Microsoft Teams. Please check each seminar announcement closely, as times may change."
   },
   {
     "@type": "TextObject",
     "text": "Link to join the Microsoft Teams live stream will be posted before each seminar."
   },
   {
     "@type": "TextObject",
     "text": "Rivers and coastal erosion supply tremendous quantities of terrestrial organic matter (OM) to the Arctic Ocean. In the marine environment, this organic matter may be decomposed, releasing greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane, as well as inorganic nutrients that may fuel primary production. This terrestrial organic matter is also an energy subsidy for heterotrophs, accumulating in multiple trophic levels. Despite the importance of terrestrial inputs to nearshore biogeochemical cycling and food webs, very little is known about OM inputs from eroding soils or coastal groundwater along the Alaska Beaufort Sea. Here, various geochemical and experimental techniques are used to characterize the amount, composition, and biodegradability of organic matter in eroding coastal soils, groundwater, and surface waters. These data show that coastal erosion and supra-permafrost groundwater are likely important sources of biodegradable OM to the Beaufort Sea in the summer open water season when river inputs are low. Future work along the Alaska Beaufort Sea will use dual-carbon isotopic mixing models and lipid biomarkers to characterize OM in lagoon surface sediments, helping track terrestrial OM in the marine environment. These results will provide insight about how varying erosion rates, river inputs, and other factors impact benthic habitats and regional carbon cycling."
   },
   {
     "@type": "TextObject",
     "text": "In addition, we also co-host a special \u201cCoastal Change Hazards\u201d seminar on the second Tuesday every other month at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern."
   },
   {
     "@type": "TextObject",
     "text": "You work with scientists, or perhaps you are one. You work with decision makers, or perhaps you are one. These two communities often come in contact with one another as they pursue actionable science. This concept refers to scientific knowledge that not only informs environmental management decisions or natural resource policy action, but\u2013importantly\u2013is explicitly motivated by the context of those decision points. The interaction between scientists and decision makers, however, does not always go smoothly, leading to two frequent laments.  One of them is \u201cThe researcher\u2019s lament: Why do they ignore my science?\u201d (Bisbal 2022, DOI: 10.1002/ecs2.4044). That perspective concentrates on researchers disappointed by the lack of support for the science they believe to be actionable, who then accuse decision makers of failing to value the proposed scientific studies. The other one is \u201cThe decision maker\u2019s lament: If I only had some science!\u201d (Bisbal In press, DOI: 10.1007/s13280-024-01986-w). Here I focus on environmental decision makers who lament instances in which actionable science is of poor quality, uninformative, unintelligible, or altogether absent, thus limiting confident decision-making. In these occasions, their reaction is often to criticize scientists, their work, or science in general. Ironically, the initial tendency among frustrated scientists and decision makers is to blame each other as the main culprit interfering with the accomplishment of their respective objectives.  Both communities would benefit by remembering that producing actionable science for a pending decision requires knowing the context for that decision beforehand. Bisbal argues that looking inward and asking, \u201cWhat can I do within my own capacity to ensure that the necessary actionable science becomes available and facilitate its use to inform decisions?\u201d could help both sides alleviate their lament load."
   },
   {
     "@type": "TextObject",
     "text": "Abstract: As storm waves propagate over shallow foreshores\u2014such as marshes, mudflats, sandy beaches, and coral reefs\u2014two notable processes occur. The first, which is more widely known, is the attenuation of the high-frequency waves that are collectively referred to as wind-sea and swell (SS), with periods less than 25 seconds. The limited water depth over the foreshore forces the SS waves to shoal and ultimately break. This shoaling and breaking, in turn, results in the second process: the growth of infragravity (IG) waves, with periods in the order of minutes. Current practice for the design and assessment of coastal flood defenses often relies on spectral wave modelling (e.g., SWAN) to estimate the nearshore wave height and period. While this approach accurately accounts for SS waves, it largely neglects the influence of IG waves. Here, the XBeach numerical model is used to: i) identify when and where IG waves play a significant role; and ii) develop an empirical model that can be combined with spectral wave models, allowing them to account for IG waves."
   },
   {
     "@type": "TextObject",
     "text": "As sea levels rise, shorelines change, and coastal hazards intensify, the need for sustainable and holistic coastal adaptation is paramount. However, successful implementation of adaptation strategies that provide the most positive outcomes\u2014ecologically, socially, and economically\u2014is rare. In the US, coastal adaptation efforts are often short-term and piecemeal. Shoreline armoring, despite its negative ecological impacts, is still the most popular coastal adaptation strategy, and if shoreline armoring continues at its current rate, nearly one-third of the contiguous US coastline will be armored by 2100. Meanwhile, despite growing evidence for the effectiveness of nature-based solutions, uptake has remained surprisingly limited. Using the methodologies of systematic literature review, focus group, and interview, Amanda\u2019s dissertation investigates the current state of the literature on coastal environmental justice, what coastal stakeholders need to make scientifically informed decisions, what USGS needs to better provide effective decision support, and the barriers to coastal adaptation that is long-term, large-scale, and nature-based."
   },
   {
     "@type": "TextObject",
     "text": "More frequent and intense storms, combined with growing coastal populations, make proper coastal management a key challenge for the coming years. As the potential impacts are highly damaging to societies, environments and economies, holistic approaches are being implemented to adequately reduce coastal risks. To achieve this goal, Disaster Risk Reduction strategies are being developed, within which hazard characterization is a cornerstone of the process. Herein, a hybrid methodology is described to obtain the wave setup and infragravity wave level components for estimating total water levels (TWLs) in coastal areas, taking into account the surf zone hydrodynamics involved. By combining statistical tools and numerical methods, high-resolution spatial distributions of wave height and water level components are calculated in an efficient and seamless manner. The proposed methodology is tested and numerically validated on La Salv\u00e9 beach (Spain), showing a robust performance for diverse scenarios. The resulting TWLs allow for a more efficient evaluation of coastal hazards, having strong potential as guideline for coastal engineers, managers and emergency planners in the elaboration of adaptation and mitigation strategies. As an application of the metamodel to these coastal management tasks, significant past events are reconstructed, and their associated water level hazard is analyzed using a vertical hazard scale."
   },
   {
     "@type": "TextObject",
     "text": "Mercury is a neurotoxin that has polluted San Francisco Bay, California since the Gold-rush era. Historical mining and modern-day sources of mercury pollution pose risks to wildlife and human health. Previous studies have mapped mercury in water bodies by taking advantage of the biogeochemical relationships between mercury and water quality variables visible with remote sensing. These relationships include 1) Colored Dissolved Organic Matter (CDOM) and dissolved total mercury and methylmercury, and 2) Total Suspended Sediments (TSS) and particulate total mercury and methylmercury. Since both TSS and CDOM can be mapped using remote sensing data, our goal is to leverage those optically available constituents and develop in-water mercury relationships to model and map mercury species concentrations. We are collecting an in-water dataset to be paired with satellite imagery for creating these models."
   },
   {
     "@type": "TextObject",
     "text": "Global climate change is already impacting California\u2019s hydroclimate via compression of the rainy season and an increased frequency of hydrologic extremes. The western US has also seen a twofold increase in the number of fires and a fourfold increase in median annual area burned in recent decades. Post-wildfire studies reveal that fire greatly facilitates erosion via changes to vegetation and soil properties, with significant erosion observed when extreme rainfall follows wildfire. This suggests that the spatial and temporal patterns of post-wildfire erosion across the state may carry signatures of global climate change, with potential impacts to water resources, aquatic and riparian ecosystems, and near-shore environments. To quantify the potential impacts of post-wildfire erosion across California, we used the process-based model, Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP), to simulate post-fire erosion in watersheds impacted by wildfires greater than 100 km2 in the time period 1984-2021 for a total of 202 fires and ~21,500 watersheds. To account for post-fire debris flows, which are not included in WEPP, we compiled measured and modeled debris flow volumes from various sources. Our results provide the first regional-scale multi-decade assessment of the magnitude of post-fire sediment mobilization in a region that is experiencing a rapidly intensifying fire regime. We find that annual sediment mobilized is highly variable in space and time with big sediment years likely reflecting major impacts to coastal ecosystems and communities as well as water resources. With the likelihood for precipitation whiplash events occurring alongside an intensifying fire regime, our results suggest that post-fire erosion poses a significant hazard for water resource security."
   },
   {
     "@type": "TextObject",
     "text": "Extreme precipitation events\u2014such as atmospheric rivers\u2014can lead to increased transport of mercury from the upper watersheds into the bay. In early 2023, northern California was hit by a sequence of severe atmospheric rivers, triggering several runoff events which impacted water quality within San Francisco Bay and presumably washed an unknown amount of mercury into the estuary system. We generated a Sentinel-2 satellite image time series of TSS over the course of the atmospheric river events from October 2022 through April 2023 (7 cloud-free images). The time series revealed large increases in TSS in January and March 2023 at creek outflows following periods of the most intense rainfall."
   },
   {
     "@type": "TextObject",
     "text": "Patterns of mercury mobilization associated with restoration of the South Bay Salt Ponds is another unconstrained variable in mercury into SF Bay proper. The South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project (SBSPRP) is in the process of reestablishing tidal flushing of former salt production ponds with the bay. An immediate science need of the SBSPRP is to evaluate the capacity to accurately map mercury species in surface water across space and time, to understand how salt pond breaches affect mercury species concentration patterns in bay surface water. The most recent SBSPRP breach occurred on December 13, 2023, reconnecting the Ravenswood Pond to the bay. A week prior, we deployed a continuously sampling C6P fluorometer in the waters just outside of the breach site. We observed a marked shift in water quality (i.e. increased turbidity and fDOM) just after the breach, prompting more investigation into potential mercury concentrations associated with this change."
   }
 ],
 "funder": {
   "@type": "Organization",
   "name": "Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center",
   "url": "https://www.usgs.gov/centers/pcmsc"
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