Sediment & Ecosystem Management

Welcome

Sustainable development and maintenance of water resources infrastructure require solutions that beneficially integrate engineering and natural systems, and then consider the results within a regional or systems context. Success in identifying and implementing the best solutions requires communication and collaboration with other Federal and State agencies as well as with stakeholders and partners.

Two representative USACE initiatives—Engineering With Nature (EWN) and Regional Sediment Management (RSM)— provide the bases to work collaboratively to identify and implement such solutions while other USACE resources, such as a database of sediment samples and Sediment Analysis tools, provide additional data to support the results.

Featured Resources

  • Regional Sediment Management (RSM) Website — Information and Resources for implementing regional approaches using best management practices for more efficient and effective use of sediments across multiple projects in coastal, estuarine, and inland environments
  • Engineering With Nature (EWN) Website — Resources enabling more sustainable delivery of the economic, social, and environmental benefits associated with water resources infrastructure through collaboration and the intentional alignment of natural and engineering processes
  • SandSnap — SandSnap is a crowdsourcing application that allows "citizen scientists" with a mobile phone and any US coin to take and upload a photograph from which sediment grain size information is extracted to build a globally accessible public sediment database.
  • Engineering With Nature (EWN) Project Mapper (ProMap) — Interactive online catalog of EWN case studies
  • Sediment Mobility Tool (SMT) — Scoping-level tool that displays Depth of Closure (DoC) and sediment mobility data for the US coastline to help in determining how best to use dredged sediment and where to site nearshore placement areas.
  • Thin-Layer Placement (TLP) Website — Case studies, photo gallery, map-based portal, sediment data, tools, and other resources that may be useful in the context of thin layer placement projects.