Frontiers in Applied Math Colloquium I Heidi Nepf, How vegetation alters waves and current, and the feedbacks to system function

MC 5501

*****CANCELLED*****

Speaker

Heidi Nepf | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Title

How vegetation alters waves and current, and the feedbacks to system function

Abstract

Aquatic vegetation provides a wide range of ecosystem services valued at over 4 trillion dollars per year. Seagrasses, salt marshes, and mangroves, damp storm surge and waves, mitigate anthropogenic nutrient loads, and provide important habitat and blue carbon reservoirs. The conservation and restoration of these landscapes has become a focus of nature-based solutions for coastal protection and carbon mitigation. This seminar will present some concepts in vegetation hydrodynamics, focusing on flexible meadows of seagrass, for which the bending of plants in response to fluid motion (called reconfiguration) plays an important role in setting the drag. Scaling laws are developed to describe the damping of currents and waves as a function of plant morphology, flexibility, and shoot density. The feedbacks from plant-flow interaction to sediment transport and carbon sequestration are discussed.