Many modern trends facilitate the need for the further development of systems that mitigate impacts of coastal flood hazards and promote resilience of nearshore communities and ecosystems. Mangroves and other natural coastal defenses have the potential to augment traditional engineered coastal structures in preventing events such as wave overtopping. In order to effectively design infrastructure combining hybrid engineered systems, costly testing at 1:1 scale is required. This study addresses a knowledge gap in defining the nature of the interactions between "green" and "gray" coastal defenses, focusing on overtopping and scaling experimental results. The study aims to analyze data from tests at different scales and compile a methodology for designing prototype scale tests from small scale experiments to identify the relative importance of friction and scaling effects moving from prototype to small scale experiments. With such a methodology, these reduced-scale physical models would become better suited to provide design feedback.
