UNE faculty secure grants to advance coastal resilience through student-driven research

University of New England faculty members Will Kochtitzky, Ph.D., and Emily Kelting, Ph.D., have secured two grants to advance Maine’s understanding of coastal erosion and changing ocean conditions — work that will engage UNE students in applied research and benefit local communities.

Kochtitzky, an assistant professor of geographic information systems (GIS) in the School of Marine and Environmental Programs, is principal investigator on a project funded through a $15,000 Maine EPSCoR Maine-SMART grant to strengthen regional coastal monitoring efforts through a buoy that will be placed in Saco Bay. The National Science Foundation’s EPSCoR grant program aims to strengthen Maine’s research and engineering infrastructure through partnerships between higher education, industry, and government.

At the same time, Kelting, an assistant professor of mathematics in the School of Computer Science and Data Analytics and a co-investigator on Kochtitzky’s research, was awarded a $16,000 Maine Outdoor Heritage Fund grant to develop an advanced mathematical model of shoreline evolution along Maine’s vulnerable coastlines — an effort that will help inform local communities about conservation decisions related to climate change.

Kochtitzky and Kelting will deploy the new oceanographic buoy in Saco Bay to collect wave, current, and temperature data in late summer. Data gathered by the buoy will feed directly into classroom lessons at UNE’s new Sustainable Innovation Center and be available in real time to the wider community.

Undergraduate students working alongside Kochtitzky and Kelting will learn field deployment, data collection, and numerical modeling techniques while generating insights vital to Maine’s working waterfronts, endangered coastal ecosystems, and key industries, such as lobstering.

“Camp Ellis (in Saco) is ground zero for coastal erosion and is decades ahead of the rest of Maine’s coast because of over a century of erosion and the lack of sand, both due to the jetty,” Kochtitzky said. “Our observations can help us understand what’s happened in the past, but Emily can help predict the future to help us better understand the changes in our region.”

Over time, the new buoy will be equipped with other data-collecting instruments to better inform coastal communities, Kochtitzky said. The initial goal is to put the buoy in between Ram Island, UNE’s own research station and living coastal laboratory, and Eagle Island further up the coast to capture the impact of the waves that hit Camp Ellis, Kochtitzky said. 

“Part of our goal is to understand broadly the changes we’re seeing in Saco Bay and the Gulf of Maine,” Kochtitzky said. “And so, it’s not just about our drone monitoring on beaches, which is great, and the seismic station we have on Ram Island, which is great, but it’s about bringing all of these observations together to help us understand what’s happening now and predict what will happen in the future.”

Much of the data collected from the buoy will be retrieved and analyzed by students, Kochtitzky said. Kelting, also, will have undergraduate students involved in her research using mathematical modeling that looks at both coastal erosion and changing coastal water temperatures, which, she noted, affects the fishing industry.

Kelting said the two projects underscore UNE’s commitment to hands-on learning that can help teach the next generation of problem-solvers how to better protect the environment.

“With the data collected from the buoy, we can refine the model’s parameters and the students will be able to accurately predict how the coastal water temperatures and shoreline will change in the coming years,” Kelting said. “Ultimately, this will guide the development of effective environmental strategies to protect our vulnerable coast.”