Publications

Runoff of sediment and other contaminants from developed watersheds threatens coastal ecosystems and services. A sediment geochemical sourcing study was undertaken on a sediment-impacted coral reef flat to identify terrestrial sediment sources and how these changed over time. Geochemical signatures were identified for watershed soils that formed on Hawaiian basaltic and alkalic lavas...

Eelgrass Zostera marina can form extensive meadows on Puget Sound river deltas. The extent to which these meadows provide critical rearing habitat for local estuarine fishes, especially out‐migrating juvenile salmon, is not well understood. Further, delta eelgrass has been impacted by diking and river channelization with unknown consequences for fish. We sampled fish in the Skagit River...

Over the course of this and the next century, the combination of rising sea levels, severe storms, and coastal erosion will threaten the sustainability of coastal communities, development, and ecosystems as we currently know them. To clearly identify coastal vulnerabilities and develop appropriate adaptation strategies for projected increased levels of coastal flooding and erosion...

The Monterey submarine canyon, incised across the continental shelf in Monterey Bay, California, provides a record of the link between onshore tectonism, fluvial transport, and deep-marine deposition. High-resolution seismic-reflection imaging in Monterey Bay reveals an extensive paleocanyon unit buried below the seafloor of the continental shelf around Monterey and Soquel canyon heads

The current lack of a robust, standardized technique for geophysical mapping of karst systems can be attributed to both the complexity of the environment and prior technological limitations. Abrupt lateral variations in physical properties that are inherent to karst systems generate significant geophysical noise, challenging conventional seismic signal processing and interpretation...

Timely assessment of coastal landforms and structures after storms is important for evaluating storm impacts, aiding emergency response and restoration, and initializing and assessing morphological models. Four-dimensional multiview photogrammetry, also known as structure from motion (4D SfM), provides a method for generating three-dimensional reconstructions of landscapes at two times...

This paper is the second of two that describes the Coastal Storm Modeling System (CoSMoS) approach for quantifying physical hazards and socio-economic hazard exposure in coastal zones affected by sea-level rise and changing coastal storms. The modelling approach, presented in Part 1, downscales atmospheric global-scale projections to local scale coastal flood impacts by deterministically...

The Santa Cruz Basin (SCB) is one of several fault-bounded basins within the California Continental Borderland that has drawn interest over the years for its role in the tectonic evolution of the region, but also because it contains a record of a variety of modes of sedimentary mass transport (i.e., open slope vs. canyon-confined systems). Here, we present a suite of new high-resolution...

Dam removal provides a valuable opportunity to measure the fluvial response to changes in both sediment supply and the processes that shape channel morphology. We present the first study of river response to the removal of a large (32‐m‐high) dam in a Mediterranean hydroclimatic setting, on the Carmel River, coastal California, USA. This before‐after/control‐impact study measured changes...

Sea cliff retreat rates are expected to accelerate with rising sea levels during the 21st century. Here we develop an approach for a multi‐model ensemble that efficiently projects time‐averaged sea cliff retreat over multi‐decadal time scales and large (>50 km) spatial scales. The ensemble consists of five simple 1‐D models adapted from the literature that relate sea cliff retreat to...

For nearly two and a half decades following World War II, production wastes from the world's largest manufacturer of technical DDT (1-chloro-4-[2,2,2-trichloro-1-(4-chlorophenyl)ethyl]benzene) were discharged into sewers of Los Angeles County. Following treatment, the wastes were released via a submarine outfall system to nearshore coastal waters where a portion accumulated in shallow...

Wastes from the world's largest manufacturer of DDT (1-chloro-4-[2,2,2-trichloro-1-(4-chlorophenyl)ethyl]benzene) were released into the Los Angeles County municipal sewer system from 1947 to 1971. Following primary treatment, the effluent was discharged through a submarine outfall system whereupon a portion of the DDT and associated degradation products were deposited in sediments of...