Wave dissipation over vegetation fields

Abstract

It has been widely recognized that ongoing climate change, most likely due to human interference with nature, may accelerate sea level rise and increase storm intensity. It is therefore urgent to design countermeasures to alleviate the impact of climate change on coastal regions. Apart from the view point of coastal protection, it is also very important for coastal engineers to keep an eye on environmental issues in the coastal region. In this context, vegetation fields such as salt marshes, sea grasses and mangrove forests in coastal regions have started to attract the attention of coastal engineers due to their function as wave attenuator. However, the wave attenuation function of a vegetated field is not well understood yet. To utilize coastal vegetation fields as a part of coastal management in practice, it is crucial to accumulate more knowledge about the physical processes, especially the hydraulic processes, and these need to be modeled in a practical sense. Hence, this thesis is intended as an investigation of the process of wave dissipation over vegetation fields through various approaches, specifically theoretical, physical and numerical studies.