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WORKSHOP
MITIGATION AND ADAPTATION RESEARCH IN VIRGINIA
August 11-13, 2015
Hilton Garden Inn, Suffolk, VA
ABSTRACT
Integrating the natural environment into adaptation
Christopher Hein, Department of Physical Sciences, Virginia Institute of Marine Science, College of William and Mary
The bay and open-ocean coasts of Virginia are composed of a wide variety of natural coastal types, each of which is responding to sea-level rise, and climate change more broadly, in unique ways. Much of the northern and western Chesapeake Bay coasts are dominated by eroding bluffs, commonly fronted by narrow sandy beaches fed by erosion of those bluffs. Elsewhere, fetch-limited beaches and interior Bay marshes are slowly migrating landward as sea-level rises, either gaining in area if fed by an abundant sediment supply and/or migrating into a low gradient natural upland, or losing area if constrained by human development on the upland side. The open-ocean coast of Virginia is composed of mainland-attached beaches in the south and barrier islands in the north, along the Atlantic Eastern Shore coast. The response of these systems is most complex and can be most rapid, driven not by slow flooding of the pre-existing topographic surface, but by complex slope equilibrium processes and the coupling of barrier beaches and their associated backbarrier marshes and tidal flats. Together, this diversity in environments, along with various anthropogenic modifications to each of those environments, creates a complex problem for mitigation of the worst effects of climate change on these "natural" systems and the ecosystems they support.