A model which simulates coastal flooding, and evaluated the economic benefits of climate adaptation strategies.
CoastDef was started by Zach Balleisen and Briggs Bulkeley. The two began to work on this project with the goal of creating a tool that holistically weighs the costs and benefits of constructing coastal flood walls and implementing resiliency strategies. The collaborative model is intended to expand in scope and functionality as a living design tool tool, that enables experimentation, collaboration, and education.
CoastDef is an open source project. It lies at the intersection of many fields, serving architects, designers, policymakers, town engineers, scientists, students, and citizens. We want people to use our work, and to contribute their innovations back to the community. We believe in strong documentation that enables people to get started quickly, contribute new features, and improve upon the existing functionality.
Zach and Briggs are both seniors at Yale University. Zach is pursuing a double major in Mechanical Engineering and Cognitive Science. Briggs is double majoring in Economics and Mechanical Engineering. We started CoastDef as our senior project in Mechanical Engineering, but intend to continue it in the future.
We hope that CoastDef will continue to grow and improve with time. We want to be useful, and our efforts have focused on providing value to teams which have tried to use the model. We want to facilitate adaptive design, and doing so will require making our tools adaptive as well.
CoastDef does not yet have full functionality, and is not complete. This is by design. Unlike many academic projects, CoastDef doesn’t have a defined endpoint or a definitive final report. Rather, we aim to share and document everything we do; our Github repository offers a snapshot of the current state of the project.
Want to use CoastDef to run your own low cost design experiments? Interesting in contributing your innovations or techniques back to other CoastDef users? Want to dip your toes into geospatial programming? We’d love to have you!
The first place to check out is our GitHub repository. You can join one of our projects, look at (or submit) an issue, and check out the latest and greatest version of the CoastDef package. Finally, if any of these terms confuse you, or you have other questions, don’t hesitate to email the CoastDef team.