Living Shoreline

Delaware Botanic Gardens (DBG)

Dagsboro, Delaware

The living shoreline is a demonstration project that educates the public about nature-based design to increase resilience of a waterfront threatened by erosion and sea level rise. Some benefits and characteristics of this shoreline improvement project are:

- A low impact implementation by using on-site woodland debris to construct the shoreline.

- Through re-vegetation and sediment accretion the tidal marsh was expanded along the 1000 ft shoreline. 

- Inversed rootwads create micro habitat. 

- The living shoreline decreases bank erosions.

The concept design was created by Karen Steenhoudt as part of her capstone project while attending Temple University

“Using nature-based materials to stabilize shorelines is just as effective, and in

some cases more effective, than hard-armoring methods such as bulkheads.”

- Dr. Marianne Walch

Photo credit: Ray Bojarski

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