Creative Applications of NBS to Protect and Preserve National Parks

In Season 8, Episode 3, host Sarah Thorne and Amanda Tritinger, Deputy National Lead of the Engineering With Nature (EWN) Program, US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), are joined by Brian Davis, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia (UVA), and Cathy Johnson, Coastal Ecologist, Northeast Region, National Park Service (NPS). Along with their colleagues and collaborators, Brian and Cathy are working with nature and incorporating innovative nature-based solutions (NBS) to combat the significant effects of climate change on three coastal national parks at high risk for extreme storms and rising sea levels.

Brian is passionate about the opportunity that NBS provides to protect natural resources, while also designing for people—protecting the things we value and the way we use public spaces. “Traditionally a lot of design practices saw those two things as separate. One of the amazing things that’s happening through landscape architecture and EWN and NBS is to unify those things.

Cathy is passionate about the NPS’s dual mandate of conserving natural resources and preserving cultural resources. “I feel so lucky to work here to preserve values of the NPS for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.” Cathy notes that NPS’s challenging mandate is made all the more difficult by climate change and its broad scale impacts, especially along the coast. 

About three years ago, Brian and Cathy formed the Preserving Coastal Parklands Team. The idea was to bring together designers and scientists, as well as engineers and other subject matter experts that could work with NPS in these different contexts and develop new nature-based solutions. Brian and Cathy describe projects that they worked on located at the Colonial National Historical Park, Assateague Island National Seashore, and the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historic Park.

Asked what they have learned from their experience, both Brian and Cathy note the value of collaboration. “One of the key lessons that we took away” Brian says, “was the value of being able to work with and listen to the people that are managing the landscape—especially the Park staff, but it also other special interest groups, people that go out there for particular reasons, or have some stake in the future of the place and some ideas about it.”

Amanda reflects on how these examples of NBS can be used by others: “What you and your team are building is a framework for how to approach these issues to achieve the compromise of these multiple needs and multiple benefits. You are creating a framework that ideally could be picked up by others in similar situations.”

When asked for their calls to action to listeners, Cathy encouraged people to “Visit your parks and the other natural places around you to better understand what’s at risk from climate change and talk to other folks about it.” Brian’s call to action is one of optimism: “Sometimes, especially studying climate change, the scale of the problem can seem daunting. But just being out in these landscapes—meeting the people that work in them and visit them—leads to ideas about preserving those values and understanding better what’s possible in the future. That fills me with optimism.”

For more information and resource links, please visit the EWN Podcast page on the EWN website at https://www.engineeringwithnature.org/  

• Amanda Tritinger at LinkedIn
• Brian Davis at UVA
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