LSU and University of Rhode Island Win $4M NSF Award to Advance Wetland Science Across Two Coasts

LSU is co-leading a new $4 million National Science Foundation (NSF) Focused EPSCoR Collaboration (FEC) award that connects Louisiana’s deltaic wetlands with Rhode Island’s salt marshes to build tools for coastal planning that work in both—and, the team hopes, in coastal systems nationwide.

The winning project, EcoCARE (Use-inspired Ecological-economic Collaboratory for Advancing Coastal Wetland REstoration and Resilience), is led by the University of Rhode Island with LSU as co-lead, joined by Roger Williams University School of Law, LSU Health New Orleans, and the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON). Two state agencies—Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) and the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management—are collaborators.

While Rhode Island has 384 miles of shoreline, stable ocean salinity, predictable tides, and marshes hemmed in by development, Louisiana has 7,721 miles, a river-dominated coast, frequent saltwater intrusion, and the highest wetland loss rate in the country—roughly 80% of the national total. Most wetland research takes place in one setting or the other, which limits where it can be applied.

“As a coastal researcher in Louisiana, I see what’s at stake every day—we’re losing wetland faster than anywhere else in the country, and communities can’t wait for answers.”

Xiaochen Zhao, LSU’s lead researcher on the project

“Through EcoCARE, LSU and our Louisiana colleagues—LSU Health New Orleans, LUMCON, and CPRA—will work together with the Rhode Island team to combine coastal modeling, AI, wetland ecology, and economic valuation to inform restoration decisions where it matters most, achieving far more than either state could alone,” said Xiaochen Zhao, LSU’s lead investigator on the project and a member of the university’s Coupled Ocean Modeling Group while serving as research assistant professor with a joint appointment in LSU’s Center for Computation & Technology and College of the Coast & Environment.

Zhao helped develop the Gulf of America Coastal Hazards Forecast System (GAm-CHFS), the first system to integrate one-way and two-way coupling of river and ocean models, delivering public forecasts of river discharge, ocean physics, hypoxia, carbon cycling, and hurricane-driven flooding. LSU’s Coupled Ocean Modeling Group also developed the Prediction-to-Map (P2M) approach, which learns the relationship between water levels at a handful of gauges and domain-wide inundation patterns, producing coastal flood predictions faster.

EcoCARE extends both of these efforts. A new coastal-vegetation-morphology machine learning model will treat parameters like decomposition rates and sediment trapping as learnable quantities constrained by physics, trained on harmonized data from both states. Outputs will inform CPRA’s Integrated Compartment Model and feed into an AI-ready EcoCARE Commons that harmonizes datasets across agencies, formats, and scales.

EcoCARE also adds to research and infrastructure developed by the LSU- and Tulane-led Mississippi River Delta Transition Initiative (MissDelta), the five-year, $22 million Gulf Research Program effort that is bringing together 38 experts from 14 institutions to study the Birdsfoot Delta where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf. Several EcoCARE members—including Zhao and Z. George Xue, LUMCON’s Zhengchen Zang, and LSU Health New Orleans’s Scott Hemmerling—are MissDelta participants.

“We put real effort into co-producing our research with the agencies and communities who live each day with deltaic change. EcoCARE takes our methods and co-production model and asks whether they hold up somewhere that looks nothing like the Birdsfoot. That’s the honest test, and how our modeling meets community needs both in and beyond Louisiana.”

Sam Bentley, Professor and LSU lead of the MissDelta team

EcoCARE pairs wetland scientists with economists and legal scholars—a gap the team identified as persistent in restoration science. Work includes estimates of how completed restoration projects affect flood damages, fisheries, and housing values, taking stock of their social return on investment as well as the societal value of biodiversity.

In addition to CPRA and LUMCON, partners on the project include the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program, the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, the United States Geological Survey Coastal Assessment Branch, and the Louisiana Landowners Association, alongside Rhode Island counterparts.

“There’s a version of this work where we publish papers and hardly any decision-makers ever read them,” said Clint Willson, dean of the LSU College of the Coast & Environment and newly announced associate vice chancellor of water and coast. “This team went the other direction—connecting first-hand with the people who are most impacted by coastal change and the agencies in charge of coastal restoration.”

EcoCARE will support five early-career faculty, one postdoc, five graduate students, and six undergraduates annually. LSU will host a two-week paid summer workshop in years two and three for up to 15 students from Louisiana community colleges and minority-serving institutions and from Rhode Island’s SURF program.

“Dr. Zhao’s success reflects LSU’s commitment to developing the next generation of coastal and wetland scientists,” Xue, who leads LSU’s Coupled Ocean Modeling Group, said. “It is rewarding to see an early-career researcher who has grown at LSU now leading a nationally competitive research effort, demonstrating the strength of our research environment, mentorship, and collaborative ecosystem.”

Read University of Rhode Island’s release: “Bay to bayou: URI biologist to lead $4 million NSF grant to advance wetland restoration in Rhode Island and Louisiana”