Waterfront property owners across coastal Mississippi and Alabama enjoy the many benefits of our coastal environments, including easy access to the Gulf and other waterways and being able to fish in their back yards, just to name a couple.
However, with these benefits come some challenges, especially shoreline erosion. To combat this erosion and protect their property, these property owners traditionally have turned towards hardened structures like bulkheads. While bulkheads do stabilize the shoreline, they also lead to the destruction of intertidal habitat, require maintenance and eventually fail.
Living shorelines are a natural alternative to hardened structures. Unlike bulkheads, which create a hard wall and destroy intertidal habitats, living shorelines use a more natural shoreline slope and native marsh grasses to preserve or re-establish the natural benefits of vegetated shorelines, including preventing erosion. Living shorelines provide property owners with an opportunity to not only protect their shorelines from erosion, but to also maintain other benefits like providing wildlife habitat.
Over the last five years, the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium (MASGC) Living Shoreline Program has been helping interested property owners explore the option of a living shoreline for their property. The MASGC Living Shoreline Program has hosted workshops for property owners, produced many outreach materials and built the technical assistance program.
Through this technical assistance program, private property owners have been able to request free services from MASGC professionals. These services include shoreline assessments, in which our team gathers on-the-ground measurements and information from the property owners that we use to create a custom living shoreline design for that property. A member from our team then sends that design to the property owner and works collaboratively with them to ensure that the design will both effectively prevent future erosion at the property and meet the property owner’s needs (e.g., space for a pier, boathouse, kayak launch, etc.).
Once the property owner approves the design, our team acts as an agent on the property owner’s behalf to complete all necessary living shoreline permitting.
The MASGC Living Shoreline Program has been accepting requests for these services over the last five years. We have seen the number of requests increase each year as our outreach and extension efforts have also grown (Figure 1).
In 2019, the program received nine requests for shoreline assessments. By 2022, that number had grown to 64. So far in 2023, our team has received 42 shoreline assessment requests. Due to living shoreline permitting challenges in Mississippi, the MASGC Living Shorelines Program has been working almost exclusively in Alabama in 2023. Even so, we are on track to match the number of shoreline assessments that we had in 2022.
Our team is encouraged by the growth in shoreline requests. To accommodate these requests and to better serve our stakeholders, our team has expanded capacity and has worked to add to the services provided for waterfront property owners. In addition to the services listed above, our team has begun to offer cost-assistance to private property owners to help with the installation of a living shoreline on their property. Our team is also working on expanding the availability of native marsh grasses for living shorelines in Mississippi and Alabama.
If you are interested in living shorelines, please contact our team by emailing Dr. Eric Sparks or me. Our team is available by request to not only provide the technical assistance described above, but also to do living shoreline presentations for homeowner associations, realtor groups, community organizations or any other group who may be interested. You can also find the many resources produced by the MASGC Living Shorelines Program on our website.
Meet the author
Sara Martin
Wetland Specialist, Mississippi State University
Sara Martin is a wetland specialist and extension associate with the Program for Local Adaptation to Changing Environments and the Mississippi State University (MSU) Coastal Research and Extension... Read more
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