Press Releases

The Water Institute receives grant to support the Bay Denesse Living Lab Initiative

Jan 27, 2022

BATON ROUGE, La. (Jan. 27, 2022) – A new grant from the Charles Lamar Family Foundation will advance a “Living Lab” initiative in Bay Denesse in south Louisiana, working to bring together coastal managers, educators and coastal researchers to improve coastal restoration projects.

Led by The Water Institute, the Living Lab will bring together coastal project managers and coastal researchers representing universities, nonprofits and government entities to develop, field test and monitor innovative restoration techniques for maximizing sediment from diversions.

Louisiana faces a crisis of coastal land loss due to subsidence (land sinking), sea level rise and other factors which has led to the loss of 1,900 square miles of land since the 1930s. Without action, the state could lose an additional 2,250 square miles over the next 50 years.

One of the tools Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority is using to combat land loss, is sediment diversions that will mimic historical land building and maintenance in the areas of the coast influenced by the Mississippi River. Part of that work involves maximizing sediment retention in the diversion outfall through various techniques such as terraces and vegetation planting.

In Bay Denesse, located on the east bank of the Mississippi River northwest of Buras, La., natural crevasses from the Mississippi River create a landscape-scale laboratory where restoration and sediment retention techniques can be designed, built and monitored. This living lab concept will allow restoration managers and researchers to combine efforts to plan controlled experiments to test and refine sediment retention methods.

The current $119,000 grant from the Charles Lamar Family Foundation builds on a network of collaborators that was developed during a previous almost $600,000 grant project funded by the National Academies of Science – Gulf Research Program which ran from 2017 to 2021. That project brought together working groups of coastal project managers, federal and state agency representatives, university researchers and nonprofits.

“It was the diversity of skill sets and interests that were represented on the group that really made it work,” said Christopher Esposito, research scientist at The Water Institute and lead on the Bay Denesse Living Lab Initiative. “It’s an exciting opportunity to work with people who are actively managing coastal landscapes in a way that researchers typically are not able to and to combine our talents for an overall better outcome.”

The most recent grant will allow the continuation of this work through advisory committee workshops of these groups, as well as installing a network of monitoring stations in the Bay Denesse area.

In addition, the grant will support a restoration design competition for high school students in the fall of 2022, the winner of which will be given an opportunity to build some aspect of their proposed restoration project. All students will get a chance to have a field trip out to the site and discussions with expert researchers and coastal managers.

Esposito got into science through his work as a math and then environmental science teacher for high school students and said he knows first-hand the importance of giving young people experiences in the field.

“Being able to see and experience coastal wetlands and the Mississippi River brings a whole new understanding of the challenges facing Louisiana to students,” Esposito said. “This is the next generation of scientists and coastal managers and we hope to encourage that interest for all of our futures.”