Opportunities for Advancing ESG Principles through Academic–Workforce Collaborations

The goal of this research was to provide recommendations and highlight areas for improvements during the solicitation, evaluation and selection process of prime contractors by US Army Corps of Engineers. To achieve this goal, the research team conducted the literature review on evaluation of construction contractors, both from a pre-award and post-award stand point followed by interviews using structured questionnaires. This research has concluded that the US Army Corps of Engineers should make strides to better define the evaluation factors that are being utilised, while providing a detailed description of the project being constructed, in order to ensure that potential contractors submit project specific information. By requesting the interested contractors for more project specific information via their management plan, schedules, organisational chart, and other potential evaluation factors, the Corps can gain better insight and understanding of each potential contractor, resulting in the selection of the best contractor for project completion.

This ZIP file contains geospatial data intended to supplement ERDC/EL TR-22-XX "Occurrence of Silver, Bighead, and Black Carp in Waters Managed by the US Army Corps of Engineers"

Would-be adopters of ecosystem service analysis frameworks might ask, ‘Do such frameworks improve ecosystem service provision or social benefits sufficiently to compensate for any extra effort?’ Here we explore that question by retrospectively applying an ecosystem goods and services (EGS) analysis framework to a large river restoration case study conducted by the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and comparing potential time costs and outcomes of traditional versus EGS-informed planning. USACE analytic methods can have a large influence on which river and wetland restoration projects are implemented in the United States because they affect which projects or project elements are eligible for federal cost-share funding. A new framework is designed for the USACE and is primarily distinguished from current procedures by adding explicit steps to document and compare tradeoffs and complementarity among all affected EGS, rather than the subset that falls within project purposes. Further, it applies economic concepts to transform ecological performance indicators into social benefit indicators, even if changes cannot be valued. We conclude that, for large multi-partner restoration projects like our case study, using the framework provides novel information on social outcomes that could be used to enhance project design, without substantially increasing scoping costs. The primary benefits of using the framework in the case study appeared to stem from early comprehensive identification of stakeholder interests that might have prevented project delays late in the process, and improving the communication of social benefits and how tradeoffs among EGS benefits were weighed during planning.

Thorndike Saville, Jr., a distinguished coastal engineer retired from the US Army Corps of Engineers, died 5 November 2014. Saville came from a family of engineers, with both his father and grandfather being accomplished hydraulic engineers. Saville's father, Thorndike Saville, Sr., helped pioneer coastal engineering in the United States, serving from 1930 to 1969 on the Beach Erosion Board (BEB) and then the Coastal Engineering Research Board (CERB). Saville attended Harvard University before joining the Army in 1943. During World War II he was a weather observer and collected meteorological data along the Atlantic coast and later in the Pacific, including New Guinea and the Philippines. After the war, he completed his undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering at Harvard in 1947. Then, he attended graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his master's degree under Prof. Joe Johnson using physical modeling to study sediment transport. In 1949 he joined the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, working for the BEB. He studied sediment and water movement in the Mission Bay and San Diego area. The next year he transferred to Washington, DC, to the BEB facility at Dalecarlia Reservoir. Saville worked for the BEB until it was abolished in 1963. He was then appointed as Chief of the Research Division at the newly established Coastal Engineering Research Center (CERC), which is now the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory at the US Army Corps of Engineers Engineer Research and Development Center. Saville's research spanned a broad range of topics including sediment transport, wave generation, wave runup and overtopping, wave and water level statistics, rip rap stability, hydrographic surveying, and coastal inlets. Saville was named Technical Director of the CERC in 1971 and held the position until his retirement in 1981. During his tenure as director, the CERC produced the Shore Protection Manual, constructed the Field Research Facility in Duck, NC, and conducted a wide variety of coastal research. Saville's coastal engineering career also included leadership roles in professional organizations and awards. He was a member of the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association and served on its Board of Directors until 1988. Saville served as a member of the Coastal Engineering Research Council of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Coasts, Oceans, Ports, and Rivers Institute. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1977 and received the ASCE John G. Moffatt-Frank E. Nichol Harbor and Coastal Engineering Award in 1979. Saville was a Professional Engineer, Fellow of ASCE, fellow of the Washington Academy of Sciences, and longtime active member of the World Association for Waterborne Transport Infrastructure (PIANC). Contributed by Jane McKee Smith

The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is currently looking at variable temporal and geographic scales for total water level and event loading projections including storm description and characterisation relevant to project design and performance. USACE projects and event description must transition from engineering to planning to economics and project management. Capturing and articulating the appropriate level of uncertainty is important to a realistic projection of resultant risk. Close collaboration with national and international experts is an essential component in USACE's process of developing practical, nationally consistent, and cost-effective measures to reduce potential vulnerabilities resulting from global changes. The USACE's approach to developing guidance for evaluating and adapting to sea level change and total water level assessment are good examples of this collaboration. A primary focus at this time is the examination of methods and tools available at graduated levels of a project study. For project-level use, the USACE is defining specific assessments of components of total water level in addition to their varying impacts on project stability and performance. The required planning and risk assessment products for each performance type will be explained. The goal is to project adequately and cost-effectively future climate contributors that can result in various levels of project non-performance in a manner that will support effective long-term planning and project expenditures.

Summary form only given. In March 1988, the US Army Corps of Engineers began a cost-shared program with the Canadian government to design, construct, and field-verify an airborne lidar hydrographic surveying system. The program is intended to build on experience gained by the Canadian Hydrographic Service in operating the Larsen 500. The authors present the system's design, including aspects of system performance and operational characteristics, and discuss the program's status including field tests scheduled to begin during the summer of 1992.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

FCE to demo DFC300 system at US Army base in California

The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) engages and collaborates with multiple stakeholders—from agency partners, to public, private, and not-for-profit organizations, to community residents—to develop its dredged-sediment long-term management strategy (LTMS) that expands benefi-cial-use (BU) practices. In spring 2019, USACE collaborated with Decision Partners, the USACE–Philadelphia District Operations Division, The Wetlands Institute, and the Engineering With Nature program leadership to adapt, test, and refine the proven behavioral-science-based processes, methods, and tools based on Decision Partners’ Mental Modeling Insight, or MMI, approach for engaging stakeholders, including community members, as part of the Seven Mile Island Innovation Laboratory (SMIIL) initiative in coastal New Jersey. The team identified key community stakeholders and conducted research to better understand their values, interests, priorities, and preferences regarding wetlands and USACE activities in the Seven Mile Island area and those activities’ effects on wetlands, including protecting the environment, wildlife habitat, aesthetic beauty, maintaining navigability, and supporting coastal resilience. Understanding stakeholder needs, values, interests, priorities, and preferences is key to designing effective engagement strategies for diverse communities for SMIIL and provides a foundation for the community engagement framework currently being developed for application across USACE.

Due to the public good character of protective measures against natural disasters, their allocation is very often in the realm of bureaucratic and expert agencies. I analysed the effect of negative media reports on a bureaucratic agency's output decisions by applying a Vector Autoregression (VAR) model on annual data of the US Army Corps of Engineers' (USACE) spending on flood protection from 1968 to 2008. The results showed that the negative media reports about the agency subsequently increase formal output.

A habitat based assessment was conducted of the US Army Corps of Engineers' Lookout Point Dam and Reservoir Project on the Middle Fork Willamette River, Oregon, to determine losses or gains resulting from development and operation of the hydroelectric related components of the project. Preconstruction, postconstruction, and recent vegetation cover types of the project site were mapped based on aerial photographs from 1944, 1956, and 1979, respectively. Vegetation cover types were identified within the affected area and acreages of each type at each period were determined. Seventeen wildlife target species were selected to represent a cross-section of species groups affected by the project. An interagency team evaluated the suitability of the habitat to support the target species at each time period. An evaluation procedure which accounted for both the quantity and quality of habitat was used to aid in assessing impacts resulting from the project. The Lookout Point Project extensively altered or affected 6790 acres of land and river in the Middle Fork Willamette River drainage. Impacts to wildlife centered around the loss of 724 acres of old-growth conifer forest and 118 acres of riparian habitat. Impacts resulting from the Lookout Point Project included the loss of winter range for Roosevelt elk, and the loss of year-round habitat for black-tailed deer, western gray squirrel, red fox, mink, beaver, ruffed grouse, ring-necked pheasant, California quail, spotted owl, and other nongame species. Bald eagle and osprey were benefitted by an increase in foraging habitat. The potential of the affected area to support wildlife was greatly altered as a result of the Lookout Point Project. Loses or gains in the potential of the habitat to support wildlife will exist over the life of the project.

In 1993, the US Coast Guard proposed to construct two breakwaters and a debris boom to protect its existing pier and moored vessels inside Ediz Hook in Port Angeles Harbor, Washington. To assist the US Army Corps of Engineers -- Seattle District in determining the potential environmental impacts of the proposed breakwaters, Battelle/Marine Sciences Laboratory performed subtidal SCUBA surveys as specified in the Washington Department of Fisheries intermediate eelgrass/macroalgae habitat survey guidelines. The objectives of the subtidal surveys were to (1) quantify the shoot densities of eelgrass; (2) provide percent cover estimates for non-eelgrass macroalgae species; (3) develop a site map indicating the qualitative distribution of eelgrass/macroalgae species, substrate characterization, approximate depth contours, and the approximate location of the proposed project features; and (4) document the time and date of the surveys, turbidity/visibility, presence of invertebrate/vertebrate species, and anecdotal observations pertinent to habitat characterization of the project site. A total of 14 dives along 12 transects (T1--T12) were successfully completed between March 15 and March 17, 1993. Eelgrass was observed on all of the transects except T7 and T8 at the western debris barrier and T12 along the waterward margin of the existing T-pier. The vicinity of the proposed east breakwater had the highest eelgrass shoot densities (up to 89 shoots/m{sup 2}) observed by the divers. Macroalgae and invertebrate species diversity were also highest at the east breakwater site. The low eelgrass densities observed at the west debris barrier site (0 to 14 shoots/m{sup 2}) can be attributed mostly to the lack of suitable substrate. The existing layer of wood debris armoring the bottom at the west project site currently limits, and in the areas of heaviest deposition probably precludes, the growth of eelgrass. As was expected, no eelgrass was observed at the south breakwater site.

Andrew Pickering’s 1995 The Mangle of Practice, and subsequent further articulation of an ‘ontology of becoming’, in which outcomes are emergent from a ‘dance’ of human and non-human agencies, has never had the impact of comparable post-humanist frameworks such as Actor-network theory (ANT). This is despite The Mangle attempting to address limitations Pickering perceived, primarily in Latour’s work, notably a partial engagement with temporal dynamics and occasional ‘retreat’ to semiotics. Pickering’s ‘dance of agency’ involves a ‘dialectic of resistance and accommodation’ that is temporally ‘tuned’ through performative revisions to human goals and intentions, to material arrangements, and to the contexts in which these operate. This very diverse collection of essays helps illuminate the power, further potential, and some limitations of Pickering’s ideas. Ranging in focus from the practicalities of police work through to a staged dialogue with Heidegger, they go some way to substantiating Pickering’s claim that he ‘‘was not so far wrong when [he] described the mangle as a theory of everything’’ (viii). In the first chapter ‘New Ontologies’, Pickering reprises key ideas from The Mangle by drawing a contrast between Mondrian’s disciplined and Cartesian-like canvasses with the far more free-form ‘‘swirls, vortices of color [and] chance juxtapositions’’ of de Kooning. He argues that the former can be understood in terms of a timeless, domineering detachment from the world and the latter ‘‘a dense, embodied, material engagement with it’’ (2, italics in original). Correlating Mondrian’s stance with Heidegger’s characterization of that of ‘modernity’, more generally, as one of ‘enframing’ Pickering argues, contra Heidegger, that we can, and should, engage the world in de Kooning like terms, using the US Army Corps of Engineers’ century and a half ‘battle’ with the Mississippi River as an example. Pickering’s living ‘‘in the thick of things’’ interpretation is that that we might ‘‘go with the flow’’ (8) and

This Dredging Operations Technical Support (DOTS) Program technical note presents the results of a study undertaken by the Navigation Branch, US Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory (CHL), at the request from the Louisville District (LRL) to examine an incident involving a single vessel and structure in a high-water condition. The vessel-position data used in this request were broadcast from an onboard Automatic Identification System (AIS) transceiver and received by US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)–owned Lock Operations Management Application (LOMA) tower sites located along the Ohio River.

The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) oversees maintaining waterways, navigation channels, and coastal inlets navigable in the United States and its territories. The USACE dredges approximately 200 to 300 million cubic yards of material annually. Dredged material is being utilized as a beneficial resource for many civil engineering applications (Rakshith & Singh, 2017; Zuliani et al., 2016). The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) recently released Policy statement 349, which is titled Dredged management for erosion control channel maintenance and coastal protection. This policy encourages the use of dredged material for coastal protection and areas that are vulnerable to coastal erosion and might be experiencing environmental degradation or danger to recreational, economic, or commercial activities. Many habitats and water bodies have been impacted by erosion to the extent of either having complete or partial loss of their ecosystem and services. A beneficial use technique that can be implemented with minimal impact to the area being restored is thin layer placement (TLP) of dredged material. This technique could potentially be used for areas that have been impacted by erosion. TLP broadly encompasses the purposeful placement of sediment or dredged material in a manner that produces a specific layer thickness or ground surface elevation necessary to achieving the overall project objectives. In TLP projects, the layer thickness typically ranges from a few centimeters to some fraction of a meter, depending upon the variation in ground surface or water levels at the site, and the functional objectives the placement is intended to achieve. This beneficial use technique could be used for different purposes such as habitat restoration, island creation, marsh restoration, beach nourishment, sediment budgeting, and wetland creation to mitigate for erosion. The US Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), Dredging Operations Technical Support (DOTS) Program has been providing support for a project, which is a living resource for thin layer placement through the development of a publicly accessible website, providing access to all available resources supporting the planning, design and construction of beneficial use projects employing thin layer placement of dredged material. The website is frequently updated to incorporate new resources, design and modeling tools, and case studies. The site is publicly available; thus, facilitating use of thin layer placement by disseminating information globally and capturing both domestic and international case studies, construction practices and lessons learned. This website serves as a portal to the most readily accessible resources, including literature, available case studies, and external resources, and provides means for users to submit case studies for inclusion on the site. A GIS map-based portal for entry of case studies, placement site and sediment source locations, associated physical and chemical data, hydrodynamics, bathymetry, design drawings, reports and other available information was also developed in conjunction with the website landing pages, providing a geographically oriented information resource for project planning, permitting, design, construction, monitoring, and cost. This website and map-based portal could be used to inform the development of thin layer placement projects to mitigate for erosion.

In an effort to identify alternative and beneficial use placement strategies for dredged sediments from the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway (AIWW), the US Army Corps of Engineers, Savannah District (SAS), and the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) performed a series of physical property tests of 34 core borings from the SAS AIWW. Physical property testing found that 14 of the borings were non-cohesive sandy materials that may be suitable for potential beach renourishment or berm construction. The remaining 20 borings had mud contents sufficient enough to result in cohesive behavior. A subset of six of these materials from across the geographic region were further evaluated to characterize their erosion behavior. Following a self-weight consolidation period of 30 days, erosion testing showed that the tested cohesive sediments had critical shear stress values that ranged from 1.7 Pa to 2.9 Pa, suggesting that these sediments would likely be resistant to erosion in most wetland environments after placement. Additionally, the cohesive sediments were found to produce gravel-sized mud clasts. These clasts could account for 20% or more of the eroded mass and significantly reduce the amount of silts and clays incorporated in suspended plumes during and immediately following placement.