Explore LSU’s Coastal Expertise and Services
Expertise
Infrastructure and Community Resilience
Through collaboration with communities, LSU experts and Louisiana Sea Grant provide climate-adaptive solutions, such as helping the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe in Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes reduce impacts from tropical storms by using nature-based solutions—including marsh creation, barrier island restoration, and living shoreline protection—that also honor their cultural heritage and priorities; or working with Tangipahoa Parish to reduce flooding.
Coastal Ecosystems and Engineering Design
LSU works to understand and harness the short and long-term natural processes that shape coastal ecosystems into nature-based designs for safer communities. We transform these solutions and hard infrastructure engineering into performance metrics that provide multiple lines of defense for our working coast.
Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico Modeling
LSU translates the physical, chemical, and biological processes in the Mississippi River Delta and Gulf of Mexico into simulation and forecast models that enhance the design, operation, and maintenance of coastal restoration projects, waterways, navigation, ports, and energy infrastructure.
Louisiana’s Water Economy
LSU and Sea Grant support the water economy by promoting sustainable food and energy production (from fisheries to petrochemical manufacturing) as well as tourism and collaborative stewardship of the state’s coastal resources through a combination of research, education, and outreach. We put science to work for coastal communities and global industries.
Services
Field and Laboratory Studies
Our field expertise spans data collection in the natural and built environments across inland waterways and rivers to the coast, nearshore, and continental shelf. We leverage new technologies and generational research excellence to collect perishable data before and immediately after extreme events, such as hurricanes and oil spills. Our state-of-the-art labs and frontier research facilities enable the testing of physical, chemical, and biological samples under controlled conditions.
Remote Sensing Products
The proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), satellites, robotics, and computer vision is accelerating our production of models to understand coastal ecosystems, infrastructure performance, and community resiliency at scale.
Data Science, Modeling, and Design
AI-augmented and physics-based modeling developed at LSU, leveraging the full capabilities of LSU’s Center for Computation & Technology, is enabling coastal engineering, hazard assessment, and climate change studies to produce sustainable designs. Our capabilities include advanced data mining, processing, and visualization to meet industry needs.
Surveys and Interviews to Inform Policy
We collect data from coastal residents, tourists, and other stakeholders to understand attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors related to coastal issues. These analyses shape policy and build strategies for community adaptations to complex changes in our climate and economy.
Historical Analysis to Improve Adaptations
We delve deep into historical records, such as maps, photographs, and written documents, to understand how coastal environments and communities have changed over time.
LSU-supported Centers & Institutes
- LSU Delta Institute
- LSU Coastal Studies Institute (CSI)
- LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio (CSS) and the LSU Center for Coastal Resiliency (CCR) have merged into the LSU Coastal Ecosystem Design Studio on the Baton Rouge Water Campus
- LSU Center for River Studies (CRS) on the Baton Rouge Water Campus