Prof. Heidi Nepf leads a lab at MIT, where she studies the interaction of waves and current with aquatic vegetation and the feedbacks to sediment transport. She and her group develop models for physical processes that determine how vegetated habitats (green infrastructure), such as seagrasses, salt marsh, and mangroves, provide coastal protection, mitigate anthropogenic nutrient loads, and provide blue carbon reservoirs.
In her keynote, Prof. Nepf will discuss recent advances in physical modelling that describe the interaction of flexible vegetation with waves. New scaling laws, which describe the influence of plant motion (reconfiguration) on the hydrodynamic drag of individual plants, are used as the basis for predicting wave dissipation over a meadow of plants. The models can be used to evaluate the role of vegetation in coastal protection and aid in the design of restoration.
