Critical Knowledge Gaps for Coastal Systems Workshop Report

Research Priorities for the U.S. South Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico

Southeast Coastal Es 1029

Executive Summary Now Available–Full Report Coming 2025

Workshop Date: March 2024
Executive Summary Download: Fast-download PDF [October 2024]

Coastal systems in the U.S. southeast are exceptionally vulnerable to changing climate and overlapping stressors like sea level rise, extreme weather, and land-use pressures. Understanding the land, ocean, and atmospheric systems underlying these environments is essential to supporting the region’s critical energy infrastructure, industry, and communities. But knowledge transferability from other U.S. coastal regions to the southeast is challenged by the region’s distinct and highly diverse physical, ecological, hydrological, and climatic features.

In March 2024, DOE’s Biological and Environmental Research program held a workshop, Critical Knowledge Gaps for Coastal Systems: Research Priorities for the U.S. South Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, to evaluate research needs and opportunities for improving predictive understanding of coastal systems in the southeast. Workshop participants identified four science priorities and research opportunities:

  1. Determine impacts of compounding and high-frequency stressors and disturbances.
  2. Examine shifting biotic communities and biogeochemical impacts associated with ecosystem state changes.
  3. Understand watershed impacts on coastal dynamics.

  4. Integrate southeast coastal processes and observations into multiscale models.

The full report will discuss unique vulnerabilities of the coastal southeast, the effects of compounding disturbances, and key gaps in data, knowledge, and modeling.

Full report coming soon.