URBAN ECOLOGIST
ASHLEY CRYAN
WHERE THE CITY MEETS THE SEA
As an ecologist, I believe that addressing the world’s most pressing resilience challenges requires embracing complexity. Drawing on the immense and exciting potential for urban planning, design and ecology to influence each other, I aim to inform a synergistic, applied approach to the management of urban coastal areas contextualized as coupled human-natural systems.
My work focuses on coastal armoring, or the process of installing artificial infrastructure along coastlines to stabilize land onshore. I use a social-ecological systems approach to generate data on how the land-sea interface could be designed to strategically enhance the facilitation of functional intertidal ecosystems in active industrial urban waterways, applying foundational principles of marine ecology to inform resilient shoreline design.
DESIGNING FOR COASTAL RESILIENCE
Mitigating mounting risks to coastal areas from climate change demands innovation and effort on unprecedented levels. To address projected risk from flooding and sea level rise, renewed nationwide investment in shoreline armoring is imminent – if current rates continue, upwards of one-third of the shoreline of the contiguous United States is projected to be armored by 2100 (Gittman et al. 2015).
In coming together to face these challenges, we are collectively facing an opportunity to strategically design shoreline areas to improve the overall quality of urban waterways and their component ecosystems through designing context-specific, ecologically supportive shoreline armoring structures. In order to define and defend the phenomena that make urban life possible and worthwhile, we must prioritize science-based and technical approaches to resilience alongside an examination of the complex relationship between human beings and the spaces they inhabit and create. Consideration of ecology and environment in systems for coastal protection will be vital in delivering co-benefits to people, property and infrastructure and enhancing coastal resilience into the coming century.
SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS APPROACH
Environmental conservation, social equity and economic prosperity are not separate concepts but intrinsically related. In order to generate design solutions that promote biodiversity and functional ecosystems while mitigating mounting risks from climate change, we must look across multiple scales at once – from the texture and materiality of our coastal interface, to the configuration of shoreline structures, to the location and demographics of vulnerable populations, to the extent of a waterway situated in a landscape of physical alterations and human activities.
In most urban areas where much natural intertidal habitat has been permanently altered, enhancement through ecological engineering can guide progress toward meaningful habitat enhancement. As scientific insight amasses on engineering methods of promoting functional urban ecosystems, we are approaching a pivotal opportunity for redesign.
My research as a graduate student is rooted in identifying opportunities to infuse value into a near-ubiquitous and so far untapped feature of urban waterways, and aid the recovery of functional ecosystems alongside consistent patterns of human use.
URBAN INTERTIDAL ECOLOGY
Ecological design strategies include those that specifically support local flora and fauna – such as adjusting the pH and rugosity of the armoring material to aid settlement by target organisms, installing patches of native riparian vegetation ahead of hard structures, and designing a network of habitat “corridors” for ecological connectivity.​
To date, there have been only a handful of scientific studies of habitat restoration along urban armored shorelines, in settings of limited size and location for restoration (see Chapman and Underwood 2011). Further studies are needed to accurately compare the ecosystem services and functions along armored shorelines, living shorelines, and unmodified shorelines, and to use this data to inform guidelines for hybrid designs that will confidently support local marine ecosystems.