I wanted to compile a few notes about our recent article “Building back bigger in hurricane strike zones“, which appeared in the December (2018) issue of Nature Sustainability. We’re grateful to have received some ace media coverage. Eleanor Cummins wrote about our findings for Popular Science. YaleEnvironment360, put out by the Yale School of Forestry…
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[Photo courtesy of NOAA.] At the end of last October, Scott Armstrong & I got a ping from Carlos Waters, a journalist and multimedia producer with Vox.com. He was working up a piece on beach nourishment. He’d come across our paper in Earth’s Future (Armstrong et al., 2016), in which we (et alia) show, using…
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A complete list of published works, including datasets, is maintained on the Publications page. These titles represent some recent highlights. “Defining coastal resilience“ – Water “Is there a bulldozer in your model?“ – Journal of Geophysical Research Earth Surface “Masked shoreline erosion at large spatial scales as a collective effect of beach nourishment” – Earth’s…
Read MoreI’m reading John Cassidy’s remarkable book How Markets Fail (2009), which includes a brief aside on economist Kenneth Arrow‘s fundamental work on “‘social’ ordering” – the problem of “converting individual preferences over a set of [possibilities]…into a consistent ordering for society as a whole” (p. 62, in Cassidy’s paperback edition). To paraphrase Cassidy’s eloquent summary,…
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I recently discovered a citation (in Breen, 1990) referring to a short article my father wrote for National Fisherman, in 1988, in which he reported on a new kind of lobster trap with a “catch escape panel”, aimed at reducing bycatch. My dad had a steady freelance gig at the time with National Fisherman, and…
Read MoreAn update on lab doings – I’ve moved from the School of Earth & Ocean Sciences at Cardiff to the Geography & Environment Unit at the University of Southampton, effective 12 September 2016. I’m grateful for my time in Cardiff, and I’m excited for new opportunities in Southampton. For the next while, I’m back to…
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Scott Armstrong & I just tried this writing exercise: Required materials include two different drafts of the same manuscript (here, let’s call one “early” and one “final”), several sheets of flip-chart paper, scissors, tape, and a handful of coloring markers. Make sure there are line numbers in the margins of both manuscripts, and print them…
Read MoreAnother very brief shout – Embedded here is an abridged copy of the syllabus for this year’s version of The Global Ocean, the gateway module for Cardiff’s first-year students in Marine Geography. As with my second-year module (Marine & Coastal Resource Systems), you can dip into the readings we’ll be doing from week to week. And…
Read MoreA very brief shout – Embedded here is an abridged copy of the syllabus for this year’s Marine & Coastal Resource Systems module, part of the core curriculum for Cardiff’s second-year students in Marine Geography. You can check out the readings we’ll be doing. Ambitious? You bet. But fun. Also, between now and May-ish (at…
Read MoreI’ve been sitting on this post a long time, in part because I haven’t known how to write it up. A couple of years ago, I wrote this manuscript and submitted it to two different peer-review journals (in series, not in parallel) as a sort of commentary piece. The first outlet rejected it with a…
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The Environmental Dynamics Lab (EDL) 