Social and Ecological Resilience of Coastal Shoreline Ecosystems: A Case Study from Coastal Alabama and Emerging Partnerships to Improve Decision Making

Coastal marine ecosystems are disproportionally concentrated with human populations and much of the world’s natural capital, but unfortunately, these regions and the ecosystem services they provide have been continually degraded by anthropogenic stressors. Coastal development is often perceived as one of the most pervasive causes of environmental decline, and traditional approaches to “protect” shorelines have often involved introducing hardened structures such as vertical walls. The detriments of vertical walls are widely recognized and include habitat degradation, altered estuarine hydrodynamics, water quality and sediment transport processes, but numerous obstacles have prevented a transition to more sustainable approaches. Our poster highlights the findings of an interdisciplinary case study and describes a recent partnership to improve communication and decision making among stakeholders. In our study, we explored the social and ecological linkages between shoreline alteration and coastal marine habitats in Mobile Bay, Alabama (USA), an “Estuary of National Significance” that has been drastically altered by humans. The first component of our case study investigated the efficacy and ecological effects of constructing oyster reefs as breakwaters to attenuate wave energies along eroding shorelines. We found that oyster breakwaters reduced shoreline vegetation retreat by more than 30% at one site and broadly enhanced populations of several economically-important fishes, shrimp and crabs. However, the vertical relief of the breakwaters declined over the course of the study, and this compromised the shoreline protection capacity. The second component of our case study explored how waterfront residents perceive hazards and environmental change, prioritize their resources, and make decisions regarding coastal protection. We found that waterfront residents were concerned with the environmental impacts of their decisions, but a majority did not perceive vertical walls to be harmful for natural shoreline habitats. Additionally, respondents perceived unaltered shorelines to require more annual maintenance than vertical walls, but actual maintenance costs were revealed to be twice as much for respondents with vertical walls. Collectively, these studies revealed significant biophysical and social impediments facing a transition away from shoreline armoring, but also identified areas where stakeholder cooperation and conservation gains may be achieved. We discuss the challenges of balancing ecosystem services and human desires for coastal landscapes, and we describe emerging partnerships to develop decision making frameworks that better account for social, ecological and biophysical components of coastal resilience.