NEWS
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Engineering with Nature to Face Down Hurricane Hazards
As coastal communities grow and severe weather events intensify, there is a growing need for information about the best ways to keep towns and cities safe. However, a lack of monitoring information about the protection provided by natural infrastructure, like berms and dunes, has limited managers’ ability to use them…
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New article: Benefit-Cost Analysis of Green Infrastructure Investments: Application to Small Urban Projects in Hinesville, GA
Is there an economic benefit to implementing small-scale natural infrastructure projects in urban areas? IRIS researchers Scott Pippin, Craig Landry and Mohammadreza Zarei addressed that question in their recent publication, “Benefit-Cost Analysis of Green Infrastructure Investments: Application to Small Urban Projects in Hinesville, GA.” Hinesville made the perfect case study,…
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Use of Natural and Nature-Based Features in Estuarine Systems
At the 11th National Summit on Coastal and Estuarine Restoration and Management, a N-EWN team, including Amanda Tritinger, Jeff King (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), Matthew Bilskie (University of Georgia, IRIS), and Justin Ehrenwerth (the Water Institute of the Gulf) hosted a short course on Engineering With Nature practices. The…
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What it means to be a researcher: water science and community connections in rural Brazil
Story by Olivia Allen. Photos and captions provided by Cydney Seigerman. Originally posted to the River Basin Center website Plenty of scientists leave their comfort zone for research, but few relocate to another continent—N-EWN member and anthropology graduate student Cydney Seigerman has done it twice. In 2014, they worked as a…
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Rhett Jackson speaks to how we can improve water quality in urban streams
In a recent feature in Georgia Magazine, IRIS affiliate Rhett Jackson spoke to how home lawns impact water quality in urban streams and beyond, and provided practical tips for what homeowners can do about it. As he said in the article, “People can reduce their water quality and carbon footprint…
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Researcher feature: Charles Van Rees
IRIS researcher Charles Van Rees was recently featured in an article by the Odum School of Ecology. In the article, he speaks specifically to the power of interdisciplinary research: “We sit there and try to communicate across huge differences in expertise, professional culture and vocabulary, and then we write cool…
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Developing Flood Solutions Along the Mississippi and Missouri River Basins
During a time of extreme rainfall patterns, river communities face unprecedented challenges. In a recent NPR article, writers Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco and Eva Tesfaye covered the flooding along the Mississippi River Basin, where IRIS researchers are looking for solutions to frequent and severe flooding caused by intensified rainfall. Families within these…
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Tybee Island Natural Infrastructure Plan
Tybee Island combines human ingenuity with natural resilience in combatting sea level rise By Sarah Buckleitner We don’t usually associate sunshine and blue skies with the sort of flooding that can shut down roads and creep into homes. But as sea level rise creeps further inland, coastal communities face a…
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Thesis Defense: Modeling Oyster Reef Resilience with Rebecca Stanley
Join us for a IRIS graduate student’s thesis defense! Rebecca Stanley, MS candidate in Civil & Environmental Engineering with Emphasis in Environmental Engineering in the College of Engineering, University of Georgia will defend her thesis: “Modeling Oyster Reef Resilience as a Form of Nature-Based Infrastructure in Response to Local Hydrodynamic Conditions” The application of…
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Rainwater Harvesting with Cisterns
Whether it’s at the turn of a faucet or a bucket from the well, every person in the world relies on having clean water. In Ceará, Brazil, where water scarcity is an issue, communities rely on collected rainfall in cisterns to ensure that they have access to water through the…
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IRIS Affiliate Jenna Jambeck awarded MacArthur Grant
Congratulations to Dr. Jenna Jambeck, a Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Environmental Engineering, for her being named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow! Jambeck was given this honor for her work investigating the scale of plastic pollution and galvanizing efforts to address plastic waste. Read the full story here.
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Sizing up marshes for flood prevention
Just how big do coastal marshes need to be to do their job as protectors of the coastline? IRIS researchers from the University of Georgia, Viyaktha Hithaishi Hewageegana, Matt Bilskie, Brock Woodson, and Brian Bledsoe investigated the matter by running simulations that tested how changes in marsh geometry impacted the…
