The state of knowledge for engineering with nature: Vegetation as wave buffer

초록

Coastal vegetation, including mangroves forests, salt marshes, and seagrass meadows, is increasingly recognized as an effective nature-based solution for mitigating coastal flooding and erosion impacts. Extensive evidence from field observations, physical model experiments, and numerical simulations demonstrates that vegetated systems can efficiently attenuate short-period waves and, under certain conditions, reduce runup, overtopping, and erosion. Over several decades, theoretical, physical, and computational studies have substantially advanced the ability to estimate and predict wave attenuation. However, uncertainties remain, most notably in the quantification of drag coefficients, the transferability of laboratory findings to natural systems, and the prediction of vegetation performance under extreme storm and long-period conditions, which collectively hinder confident engineering application and implementation. A further barrier is the fragmentation of knowledge across hydrodynamics, ecology, and engineering, resulting in the absence of an integrated synthesis that connects process-based theory, laboratory evidence, and field-scale observations. This review addresses these gaps by providing a comprehensive, engineering-oriented consolidation of wave-vegetation knowledge across theory, experiments, field measurements, and numerical modeling. The review highlights the mechanisms that govern attenuation across different vegetation types and hydrodynamic regimes; evaluates existing empirical, process-based, and calibration-free approaches; and synthesizes evidence on performance under both averaged and extreme wave conditions. By bridging fundamental research with engineering practice, this review establishes a unified scientific basis for applying vegetated and hybrid green-grey systems in coastal protection design and operational decision-making.

키워드