Graduate Student
I grew up on the East Coast and have spent many summers in the Great Lakes region. It’s easy to take for granted the roles that vegetation play in nature, and view plants as ugly weeds to clear instead of species to protect. Seagrasses provide important habitat, carbon sinks, and other ecological functions, but are threatened by overdevelopment, pollution, and climate change. Long meadows of seagrass have been shown to attenuate currents and attenuate wave energy, but the dynamics of wave damping in the presence of currents are not as well understood. In addition, the morphological characteristics of plants vary widely in scope and in their relative contributions to vegetation-induced drag in oscillatory flow. I plan to investigate these areas to improve our understanding of the complex but ubiquitous interactions between flow and vegetation. Improved models of flow interactions with vegetation can help predict how storms and currents will affect vulnerable meadows, and help design infrastructure and living shorelines to protect coastal areas.