IRES Track II: Multidisciplinary Coastal Zone Hazards Institutes - France, Japan, Indonesia

Over the course of this 3-year project, a total of 42 U.S. students (14 per year) will gain multidisciplinary training and hands-on laboratory and field experience in coastal zone hazards research during a two-week stay at foreign institutions in one of the three Advanced Studies Institutes (ASI) sites (one ASI site per year). The U.S. team (Boston University, Northern Arizona University, and University of Alaska Fairbanks) will lead the ASI activities in partnership with faculty/lectures in the University of South Brittany (UBS), France, Tohoku University (TU) and RIKEN, Japan, and the University of Diponegoro (UNDIP) and University of Gadjah Mada (UGM), Indonesia.

The ASI activities set in an international context will provide a multi-stage, high-quality training and research for graduate students that will produce data sets and learning materials applicable to PhD work and other research activities beyond the duration of this project. Women and under-represented minorities in STEM fields will be particularly targeted by the U.S. team.

The STEM experiences set in the global context will prepare participating U.S. students to address global challenges using both a scientific as well as policy lens in their future career pathways.

These ASIs address the compounded effect of physical and human-induced changes affecting densely populated coastal zones. As coastal areas become more densely populated, they become increasingly exposed to climate change phenomena (sea level rise, tidal and storm-surge flooding) which in combination with natural geological hazards (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, land subsidence) and human driven landscape transformation (urbanization, agriculture and aquaculture, deforestation) can amplify the destruction and loss of ecosystem services, life, and property.

Remote Sensing technology and big data analytics provide us the mean to measure and observe changes across scale and time. However, the vast amount of data produced by near-real time observations imposes a new challenge: how can we effectively use the data to assess and predict risk exposure of a growing population in coastal regions to these coastal hazards?

Understanding the processes underlying coastal dynamic changes requires a set of skills drawn from multiple disciplines that is often missing in graduate programs in the U.S. This is the motivation for establishing a multidisciplinary coastal hazards training program for advanced graduate students in three locations that exemplify various types and levels of coastal change processes and risks.

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.