Vegetated living shorelines

Rocky shoreline with vegetation.

While there is increasing interest in the use of living shorelines to enhance resilience to coastal hazards, restoring soft-sediment habitats like seagrass, mangroves and saltmarsh in erosional environments is challenging.

Naturally, these habitats provide a self-stabilising environment for new recruits to flourish, which is lost on degraded shorelines. Hybrid living shorelines that use an engineered structure to support the establishment and/or persistence of vegetation is a novel and promising solution to higher energy shorelines. The engineered structure needs to be successfully designed to overcome limitations to the habitat establishment.

Our research supports the development of technical guidance for hybrid living shorelines through answering questions such as:

  1. What are the thresholds to the establishment and persistence of different species of coastal vegetation?
  2. What is the hydrodynamic impact of different types of engineered structures used in hybrid living shorelines?
  3. How can we combine ecological and engineering knowledge to optimise the design of hybrid living shorelines?

Selected relevant publications

Chan, S.Y.C., Hsiung, A.R., Swearer, S.E., and Morris, R.L. 2024. Differential effects of mangrove cover and engineered structures on benthic macrofauna and nekton assemblages in hybrid living shorelines. Ecological Engineering 216, 107620, 14 pp.

Hsiung, A.R., Fest, B., Rubinstein, T., Swearer, S.E., and Morris, R.L. 2025. Effectiveness of novel hybrid mangrove living shorelines is context dependent. Journal of Applied Ecology 62, 1188-1201.

Chan, S.Y.C., Swearer, S.E., and Morris, R.L. 2024.  Mangrove cover and extent of protection influence lateral erosion control at hybrid mangrove living shorelines. Estuaries and Coasts 47, 1517-1530.

Hsiung, A.R., Ong, O.X.J., Teo, X.S., Friess, D.A., Todd, P.A., Swearer, S.E. and Morris, R.L. 2024. Determinants of mangrove seedling survival incorporated within hybrid living shorelines. Ecological Engineering 202, 107235, 8 pp.

Morris, R.L., Fest, B., Stokes, D., Jenkins, C. and Swearer, S.E. 2023. The coastal protection and blue carbon benefits of hybrid mangrove living shorelines. Journal of Environmental Management 331, 117310. 12 pp.

Strain, E.M.A., Kompas, T., Boxshall, A., Kelvin, J., Swearer, S.E. and Morris, R.L. 2022. Assessing the coastal protection services of natural mangrove forests and artificial rock revetments. Ecosystem Services 55, 101429. 10 pp.

Tachas, J.N., Raoult, V., Morris, R.L., Swearer, S.E., Gaston, T.F. and Strain, E.M.A. 2021. Eco-engineered mangroves provide complex but functionally divergent niches for estuarine species compared to natural mangroves. Ecological Engineering 170, 106355. 11 pp.