Is There a Bulldozer in your Model?

Abstract

Deliberate, real‐time human interventions into geomorphic processes are a phenomenon that no off‐the‐shelf numerical model of morphodynamics is built to capture. We suggest that active, responsive human processes that affect sediment transport during major storm events be included in evolving efforts to model geomorphic change.

Usable Science for Managing the Risks of Sea‐Level Rise

“…With the presence of coastal communities, human responses to coastal change provide additional feedbacks to coastal environments, suggesting the possibility of emergent interactions at multidecadal time scales (Jin et al, ; Lazarus et al, ; Miselis & Lorenzo‐Trueba, ; Werner & McNamara, ). Human responses intended to preserve coastal buildings and infrastructure—such as building seawalls, constructing groynes, nourishing beaches, stabilizing inlets, or armoring updrift headlands—have accumulated to the point where the evolution of coastal landscapes cannot be considered to be caused by nature alone (Hapke et al, ; Lazarus & Goldstein, ; Lazarus et al, ; Nordstrom, ; Werner & McNamara, ). The natural dynamics described in Figure are still at play but are heavily affected by human activities, development, and land‐use changes.…”

“…Further work is needed to bridge the gap between engineering and geologic approaches and construct morphodynamic models that can integrate over multiple storm events and include post‐storm recovery and fair weather action that occurs between storms. Models also need to account for the complex interplay of the different regions or environments—from the onshore subaerial and lagoonal components, through the surf zone, and seawards onto the continental shelf itself—as well as for feedbacks between natural processes and human activities (Lazarus & Goldstein, ; Lazarus et al, ; Werner & McNamara, ).…”

Comparing patterns of hurricane washover into built and unbuilt environments

“…Given that washover deposits tend to be smaller in built relative to unbuilt settings (Fig. 4a), as others have noted (Rogers et al, 2015), and that deposits in built settings may or may not be recycled within the local sedimentary system (Lipton, 2013;Lazarus & Goldstein, 2019;Nordstrom, 2004), then built-environment controls on washover scale bear fundamentally on the long-term persistence of low-lying coastal barrier environments and their resilience to future hazard impacts. In more immediate terms, without understanding how much hazard-driven sediment fluxes through built environments, or knowing the anthropogenically modified pathways of that sediment, sediment budgets for developed coastlines are effectively unconstrained.…”

“…A few notable exceptions have measured washover extent (Hall & Halsey, 1991;Morton & Paine, 1985) and volume (Overbeck et al, 2015;Rogers et al, 2015;USGS 2005) in beachfront built environments following a storm event, or described the phenomenon in built settings more broadly (Nordstrom, 2004). One reason for this dearth of investigations in built environments is that storm deposits in built areas are rapidly cleared away by road crews (Nelson & Leclair, 2006;Nordstrom, 2004) -sometimes even as the storm and deposition is in progress (Lazarus & Goldstein, 2019). Post-storm aerial or satellite imagery may serve as the only record of deposition patterns (Fig.…”

Resilience of River Deltas in the Anthropocene

“…The morphological imprints of an extreme event can be widespread (Lazarus & Goldstein, 2019) and depend on the detailed human interventions designed to counteract the negative effects of extremes. To date, state-of-the-art high-complexity numerical models are mainly used to analyze flood resilience based on hydrodynamic simulations, without resolving morphological developments (e.g., Islam et al, 2019;Ferrari et al, 2020).…”