Publications

Dauphin Island is a 26-km-long barrier island located southwest of Mobile Bay, Alabama, in the north-central Gulf of Mexico. The island contains sandy beaches, dunes, maritime forests, freshwater ponds and intertidal wetlands, providing habitat for many endangered and threatened species. Dauphin Island also provides protection for and maintains estuarine conditions within Mississippi...

Introduction Hurricane Sandy, which made landfall on October 29, 2012, near Atlantic City, New Jersey, had a significant impact on the coastal system along the south shore of Long Island, New York. A record significant wave height of 9.6 meters (m) was measured at wave buoy 44025, approximately 48 kilometers offshore of Fire Island, New York. Surge and runup during the storm resulted in...

“Whiting” in oceanography is a term used to describe a sharply defined patch of water that contains high levels of suspended, fine-grained calcium carbonate (CaCO3). Whitings have been reported in many oceanic and lake environments, and recently have been reported in southwest Florida coastal waters. Here, field and laboratory measurements were used to study optical, biological, and...

Staghorn coral, Acropora cervicornis, is a threatened species and the primary focus of western Atlantic reef restoration efforts to date. We compared linear extension, calcification rate, and skeletal density of nursery-raised A. cervicornis branches reared for 6 months either on blocks attached to substratum or hanging from PVC trees in the water column. We demonstrate that branches...

Description Land development and alterations of the ecosystem in south Florida over the past 100 years have decreased freshwater and increased nutrient flows into many of Florida's estuaries, bays, and coastal regions. As a result, there has been a decrease in the water quality in many of these critical habitats, often prompting seagrass die-offs and reduced fish and aquatic life...

The framework presented herein supports a changing paradigm in the approaches used by coastal researchers, engineers, and social scientists to model the impacts of climate change and sea level rise (SLR) in particular along low-gradient coastal landscapes. Use of a System of Systems (SoS) approach to the coastal dynamics of SLR is encouraged to capture the nonlinear feedbacks and dynamic...

This chapter focuses on the morphologic variability of barrier islands and on the differences in storm response. It describes different types of barrier island response to individual storms, as well as the integrated response of barrier islands to many storms. The chapter considers case study on the Chandeleur Island chain, where a decadal time series of island elevation measurements...

Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center collected 303 surface sediment samples from Dauphin Island, Alabama, and the surrounding water bodies in August 2015. These sediments were processed to determine physical characteristics such as organic content, bulk density, and grain-size. The environments where the sediments were collected...

No abstract available.

Coral reefs serve as natural barriers that protect adjacent shorelines from coastal hazards such as storms, waves, and erosion. Projections indicate global degradation of coral reefs due to anthropogenic impacts and climate change will cause a transition to net erosion by mid-century. Here, we provide a comprehensive assessment of the combined effect of all of the processes affecting...

No abstract available.

Florida has one of the highest concentrations of springs in the world, with many discharging into rivers and predominantly into eastern Gulf of Mexico coast, and they likely influence the hydrochemistry of these adjacent waters; however, temporal and spatial trends have not been well studied. We present over 20 yr of hydrochemical, seasonally sampled data to identify temporal and spatial...