REU Site: Resilience and Adaptation to Coastal Change Across Communities

This REU Site will contribute to developing an interdisciplinary, systems-level understanding of the interplay between the environment and society in coastal regions using a Team Science approach. The project will host REU students at East Carolina University’s Coastal Studies Institute with additional remote mentors from Clemson University and the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo.

Research teams will investigate and document how human actions positively or negatively influence coastal resilience in the face of extreme weather events, sea level rise, and population growth. Undergraduate researchers will work with faculty at these three institutions to address issues in coastal resilience, which is a problem of societal urgency as these regions face critical challenges to infrastructure, food and energy security, human health, and ecosystem sustainability.

The project includes important training elements in Team Science that will prepare students to effectively address problems in interdisciplinary work and graduate research settings, build their ability to communicate science to the public, and take a systems perspective on solving societal challenges. Targeted professional development activities, a diversity of participants, and use of virtual collaboration tools to support Team Science with a range of researchers from multiple fields and institutions will therefore also engage students in working across disciplinary, geographic, and cultural boundaries.

These skills will prepare the students to participate in research when direct contact between research team members is not possible, including situations such as the current pandemic where isolation is due to health and safety concern and not just geographic or cultural factors.

Students will pursue research projects across a range of interdisciplinary areas that drive the evolution of environmental and social systems. Systems science concepts will integrate projects across the REU, enabling students to identify and understand how dependencies between earth science and other disciplines impact society. Team Science and virtualization of collaboration efforts will engage REU participants in an intensive week-long training bootcamp at ECU’s Coastal Studies Institute in the Outer Banks of North Carolina followed by nine weeks of intensive research.

Professional development activities will be structured to enable the students to overcome geographic and cultural barriers to collaboration, thereby providing them a unique skill set to pursue global change research as an effective interdisciplinary team member. Examples of training activities include enhancing the students’ knowledge base in global change, data science, and resilience; use of technologies such as GIS, systems dynamics models, and professional communication tools; and professional development in the conduct and presentation of individual and team-based research.

Students will be recruited from universities across the Carolinas and Puerto Rico through the Puerto Rico Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation and partnerships with HBCUs and two year colleges to reach a wide population with varying demographic backgrounds and limited access to research opportunities. The project will conclude with a student Symposium with poster presentations and student research videos developed using science communication strategies to engage the public in research.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.