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The vegetation capacity to protect the coasts from wave action is becoming more important and attractive due to ongoing sea level rise and increasing storminess. In addition, it is a quite environmentally friendly way. Quantifying the vegetation effect in wave propagation will be relevant for coastal management. A non-hydrostatic wave model based on the nonlinear shallow water equations, SWASH, offers opportunities to quantify the wave dissipation effect in vegetation fields. However, limited applications of SWASH addressing this subject can be found in the literature and therefore it is important to enhance the existing knowledge on the model behaviour. In this research, in order to understand the characteristics of the SWASH model further, the model is applied to reproduce the significant wave height (H s) evolution over vegetation fields measured in flume experiments and in field campaign. Overall, SWASH performed very well in reproducing the H s evolution measured both in the laboratory and in the field. In the case of flume data, the statistical scores MBE, RMSE and MRE, showed that the SWASH performance clearly improved when increasing the number of vertical layers assumed in the simulations. In the case of field data, considering a vegetation factor (V f) between 0.1 and 0.5, that represents the overall effect of scarcely known numerical vegetation parameters, led to a fairly good SWASH performance in modelling the H s evolution over vegetation.

The knowledge of wave transformation and breaking characteristics near coastline is essential for the nearshore hydrodynamics and the design of coastal structures. This paper describes a wide range of wave flume tests performed at the National Laboratory for Civil Engineering (LNEC), located in Lisbon (Portugal), which main objective was to study wave shoaling and breaking over a set of different gentle slopes for several incident waves and thus to contribute for a better understand of the hydrodynamics of wave transformation.The experimental conditions, the measurement equipment, the incident wave characteristics, the type of measurements performed (free surface elevation and particle velocity) and the data obtained are described. Time and spectral analysis based upon the measured data are also performed and presented. For a regular wave with a period of 1.5s and a height of 0.1m are presented and discussed the following results: free surface elevation at selected sections along the flume; the spectral analysis; the significant wave height and average period along the flume; the particle velocity components at different locations along the flume; the average, maximum and minimum values of the longitudinal component of the velocity along the flume; the two dimensional distribution of the three components of the velocity; and longitudinal velocity component vertical profiles.