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Daniel Ciarletta, Ph.D.

Daniel Ciarletta is a Research Physical Scientist at the USGS St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center. He investigates the evolution of coastal morphology to understand how beach, dune, and marsh landscapes are connected over different timescales. To accomplish this, he combines field approaches with numerical modeling to quantify geomorphological change through time.

Daniel's work includes efforts to understand how dune morphology can be used as a proxy to quantify rates of sediment input and loss in coastal barrier islands, as well as how lags in sediment transfer and rates of sand partitioning within barrier islands influence long-term landscape evolution. He has created and modified several reduced-complexity model frameworks to explore these dynamics. 

More recently, his work includes efforts to (1) understand the resilience of coastal systems to variations in inlet-, storm-, and engineering-induced variations in sediment availability, and (2) explore couplings between different coastal landscapes over varying timescales.

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