The design of permeable structures aimed at rehabilitating mangroves: A Case Study in Demak, Indonesia

Mangrove forests are highly valuable environments that offer numerous ecosystem services, including carbon storage, serving as nurseries for fish and shrimp, and providing timber. Additionally, these ecosystems offer coastline protection against erosion and flooding by attenuating waves and trapping sediment. Despite the crucial role of mangrove...

Influence of Sandy Foreshores on Overtopping in Non-Tidal Low-Energy Shallow Lake Environments

Sea level rise will increase the risk of flooding in coastal areas. This poses a risk to the coastal protection as well as rivers and lakes close to the coast. Solutions are needed to cope with this threat. The past decade, nature based solutions have gained significant interest. One of these solutions could be sandy foreshores. Due to the use...

Geometrical Mangrove Models: Quantifying frontal surface area distribution for Avicennia marina vegetation: an important parameter for estimating wave attenuation

To estimate wave attenuation by mangrove forests, trees are often schematized as uniform cylinders (over the height) representing a tree’s stem. However, trees have more complex geometrical features that influence the interaction between waves and tree structures. Recent studies have shown that the frontal surface area distribution over the...

Towards a nature-based solution for the Brouwersdam beach in the Netherlands: Following the Building with Nature approach to counteract long-term erosion of a recreational beach as a consequence of large-scale morphological changes in a closed-off outer delta

Since the Brouwersdam was built as part of the Delta plan, the Grevelingen outer delta undergoes large-scale morphological changes. These changes led to the formation of a shoal adjacent to the dam, which is referred to as the Brouwersdam beach. The beach has been eroding and shifting towards the northeast ever since. The beach has no safety...

Room for the Wadden Sea: Analysis of a building with nature approach to strengthen the foreshore at Koehool-Lauwersmeer

A significant part of the Netherlands lies below sea level. The Dutch have protected their land against seawater since the 10th century. Nowadays, the Netherlands is protected by 3800 km of primary flood defences. Since the Flood Defences Act was included in the Dutch law in 1996, all flood defences are tested against the national safety...

Scheveningen 2100: Water resilience against climate change

‘The Dutch are not going to lose against the sea’, is a commonly accepted quote of the citizens of The Netherlands. Having developed a country below sea level, Dutch people are aware of the challenges of the sea, but are committed in an endless fight against it. Nowadays, with global warming increasing, the challenge for them is even bigger. Sea...

Building with Nature as a cross-disciplinary approach: The role of hybrid contributions

The incentive for this publication was to expand the realm of enquiry around the topic of Building with Nature (BwN), for two main reasons. First to gain an interdisciplinary, and therefore deeper, understanding of BwN as an object of study. Secondly, but no less important, is an understanding of how different forms of knowledge contribute to...

Building with Nature & Beyond: Principles for Designing Nature Based Engineering Solutions

This book is based upon the edX MOOCs Engineering: Building with Nature and Beyond Engineering: Building with Nature. The Engineering: Building with Nature MOOC explores the use of natural materials and ecological processes in achieving effective and sustainable hydraulic infrastructure designs, distilling Engineering and Ecological Design...

Exploratory modelling of Nature-Based Island development at the Abandoned Yellow River Delta: Jiangsu Province, China

The People's Republic of China experienced large socio-economic development over the last decades, which was mainly concentrated in coastal regions. Jiangsu Province is among these regions, which shows large socio-economic differences between north and south. The Chinese Central Government has allocated Binhai County as a new coastal development...

Managing erosion of mangrove-mud coasts with permeable dams – lessons learned

Mangrove-mud coasts across the world erode because of uninformed management, conversion of mangrove forests into aquaculture ponds, development of infrastructure and urbanization, and/or extraction of groundwater inducing land subsidence. The accompanied loss of ecosystem values, amongst which safety against flooding, has far reaching...

Coastal engineers embrace nature: Characterizing the metamorphosis in hydraulic engineering in terms of four continua

Hydraulic engineering infrastructures, such as reservoirs, dikes, breakwaters, and inlet closures, have significantly impacted ecosystem functioning over the last two centuries. Currently, nature-based solutions are receiving increasing attention in hydraulic engineering projects and research programs. However, there is a lack of reflection...

Building with Nature: Creating awareness on Building with Nature in Chile

Growth of world population, sea level rise, land subsidence and climate change gives new challenges for the present and the future. A new innovative approach of engineers is needed to reach socio-economic development with care for the environment. In the Netherlands, an EcoShape consortium is initiated where multiple experts came together from...

The Sand Motor: A Nature-Based Response to Climate Change: Findings and Reflections of the Interdisciplinary Research Program NatureCoast

NatureCoast is the largest research program that focused on the Sand Motor, a large sandy peninsula, constructed in 2011 on the Dutch North Sea coast near The Hague. This unprecedented pilot project involved placing 21.5 million m3 of sand on and in front of the beach with the aim that it would spread along the coast. The Sand Motor<br/>is a...

Beneficial use of dredged sediment to enhance salt marsh development by applying a ‘Mud Motor’

We test an innovative approach to beneficially re-use dredged sediment to enhance salt marsh development. A Mud Motor is a dredged sediment disposal in the form of a semi-continuous source of mud in a shallow tidal channel allowing natural processes to disperse the sediment to nearby mudflats and salt marshes. We describe the various steps in...