[Ecolunch] NCEAS EcoLunch: Mark Browne, March 1

[Josephine Rodriguez]

Dear All,

Please join us for EcoLunch:

*Dr. Mark Browne, NCEAS*
*
**Water-tight solutions to engineering intertidal biodiversity in our 
cities**
*
Thursday March 1 @ 12:15


 From Dr. Browne:
ABSTRACT: Worldwide responses to urbanization, expanding populations and 
climatic change mean biodiverse habitats are replaced with expensive, 
but necessary infrastructure. Coastal cities support vast expanses of 
buildings and roads along the coast or on "reclaimed" land, leading to 
"armouring" of shorelines with walls, revetments and offshore structures 
to reduce erosion and flooding. Currently infrastructure is designed to 
meet engineering and financial criteria, without considering its value 
as habitat, despite artificial shorelines causing loss of intertidal 
species and altering ecological natural processes that sustain natural 
biodiversity. Most research on ameliorating these impacts focus on 
soft-sediment habitats and larger flora (e.g., restoring marshes, 
encouraging plants to grow on walls). In response to needs for greater 
collaboration between ecologists and engineers to create infrastructure 
to better support biodiversity, this talk will show how such 
collaborations lead to small-scale and inexpensive ecologically informed 
engineering which reduces loss of species of organisms from rocky shores 
replaced by walls. Adding experimental novel habitats to walls mimicking 
rock-pools (e.g., cavities, attaching flowerpots) increased numbers of 
species by 110% within months, in particular mobile animals most 
affected by replacing natural shores with walls. These advances provide 
new insights about melding engineering and ecological knowledge to 
sustain biodiversity in cities.




********************************

GENERAL INFORMATION:

EcoLunch is Thursday, at 12:15 pm (brown bag lunch) National Center for 
Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, 735 State ?St., Suite 300, Santa 
Barbara, CA 93101 Phone: (805) 892-2500

A schedule of upcoming EcoLunch seminars is available on the web at: 
?http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/ecolunch

DIRECTIONS FROM UCSB BY BUS: You can get to NCEAS by taking the 11:40 
a.m. bus (#24x) from campus. From the transit center, walk one block 
east to

State Street and two blocks south to the Balboa Building at 735 State 
Street. To return to campus, you can take the 1:30 p.m. bus (#24x) from

the transit station and be back on campus by 1:49 p.m. Or you can take 
the 2:20 p.m. bus and arrive on campus at 2:39.

BY CAR: take Highway 101 South. Once in Santa Barbara, exit on Carrillo 
Street. Turn left onto Carrillo. Drive 5 blocks and turn right on State

Street. NCEAS is located on the right side at 735 State St., Suite 300. 
To park: Drive past NCEAS on State Street and make your first right on 
Ortega

Street. Drive 1 block and turn right on Chapala Street. Park in the 
underground Mall parking lot on your right. (First 75 minutes free). 
Once you are at the Balboa Building: We are on the

third floor in the lounge area.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.nceas.ucsb.edu/pipermail/ecolunch/attachments/20120225/a547edda/attachment.html>