RESILIENT COMMUNITIES: A VULNERABILTIY ASSESSMENT IS ONLY STEP ONE

Projections of global sea-level rise into the future have become more pessimistic over the past five years or so. A global rise by more than one metre by the year 2100 is now widely accepted as a serious possibility if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated. That is witnessed by the scientific assessments that were made since the last IPCC report was published in 2007. The Delta Commission of the Dutch government projected up to 1.10 m as a 'high-end' scenario (Vellinga et al 2009). The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) projected up to 1.40 m (Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research 2009), and the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) gives a range of 0.90–1.60 m in its 2011 report (Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme 2011). And recently the US Army Corps of Engineers recommends using a 'low', an 'intermediate' and a 'high' scenario for global sea-level rise when planning civil works programmes, with the high one corresponding to a 1.50 m rise by 2100 (US Army Corps of Engineers 2011).

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.

The Lowermost Mississippi River (LMMR), from the Gulf of Mexico to 520 km above Head of Passes, remains critical for flood conveyance and transport of agricultural and industrial bulk products from the central United States. The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has managed it with little change for 80 years using the levees and spillways constructed under the Mississippi River and Tributaries project (MR&T). At the same time, public demand for reconnection of the Mississippi to the deteriorating delta ecosystem has grown. Significant sediment diversion projects have been authorized downstream of New Orleans to restart deltaic wetland building to conserve fish and wildlife resources and reduce hurricane flood risk to delta communities. Recent research and observations from the back-to-back record 2011 high-, and 2012 low-discharge events indicate that LMMR hydraulics have changed significantly, and that sea level rise, subsidence and a reduction in sand transport through the Plaquemines-Balize birdsfoot delta (PBD) now favor formation of new, unregulated outlets upstream. During the peak of the 2011 flood, only 27 % of the 65,000 m3-s−1 discharge entering the LMMR reached the Gulf via Head of Passes, compared to 36 % passing through the two outlets of the shorter Atchafalaya distributary. About 20 % of the water lost from the LMMR occurred through unregulated flow overbank and through small, but growing, distributaries between New Orleans and Head of Passes. Adding delta restoration to existing USACE missions will require adjusting the MR&T but has potential to lower flood flow lines and reduce navigation dredging costs sufficiently to allow LMMR ports to accommodate larger, Post-Panamax ships.

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>

Coastal erosion is occurring all over the world. For example, the amount of permanent land loss (28,000 km 2 ) is more than double the land area gained According to the US Army Corps of Engineers (1984), erosion occurs due to natural and artificial factors. Moreover, severe coastal disasters can result from sea-level rise and high waves (Arns et al., 2017). To cope with these coastal erosion problems, many researchers have attempted to develop different types of coastal erosion prevention methods. In this regard, artificial coral reefs (ACRs) were introduced by Han Ocean Corp. to help mitigate coastal erosion problems. For example, Hong et al. (2018) analyzed the wave attenuation and erosion mitigation performance using a two-dimensional experiment. Hong et al. (2020) examined the variation characteristics of the irregular wave

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has been tasked to complete project studies more quickly without sacrificing model fidelity and to shift to a watershed and systems-based approach for decision making that incorporates risk analysis. These requirements are central to the USACE Civil Works and Planning Transformation Objectives. While tools exist to address these requirements, those tools have not been universally adopted. After the 2010 and 2011 floods, USACE initiated a plan to build real-time Corps Water Management System (CWMS) watersheds (212) throughout the Nation where USACE has a water management responsibility. One of the key reasons USACE management accepted the plan was that construction of CWMS models benefited other USACE mission areas. One benefit was that the CWMS models could be readily converted to planning models. Preliminary results indicated that the planning process could be shortened significantly if CWMS models were available early in the planning process. USACE performed a detailed study of three basins where CWMS models were converted to HEC-WAT (Watershed Analysis Tools) models. This paper will summarize the study and indicate that starting with CWMS watersheds; significant efficiencies are created thereby supporting the USACE goal of streamlining the planning process while still using detailed modeling.

Camp Century was a military base constructed by the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1959 in the near-surface layers of the Greenland ice sheet at 77.13°N, 61.03°W and 1886 m above sea level (Clark 1965; Fig. 1). The base housed up to 200 military personel and was continuously occupied until 1964. After three years of additional seasonal operation, the base was abandoned with minimal decommissioning in 1967. Recent Danish scholarship has documented the political and military history of Camp Century in detail (Nielsen &amp; Nielsen 2016). In 2016, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) participated in a multi-nation study that presented regional climate simulations that suggested the icesheet surface mass balance at Camp Century may change from net accumulation to net ablation by 2100 under the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change RCP8.5 ‘business-as-usual’ climate scenario. However, according to Colgan et al. (2016), net accumulation would persist beyond 2100 at Camp Century under the climate-change mitigation characterised by RCP4.5, an approximately ‘Paris Agreement’ climate scenario. In 2017, in response to concerns from the Government of Greenland over the potential to remobilisation of contaminants from Camp Century within the next century, the Government of Denmark established a programme for long-term climate monitoring and detailed one-time surveying of the debris field at Camp Century (Colgan et al. 2017). This report describes the initial field activities of the Camp Century Climate Monitoring Programme in the context of the four programme goals: 1. To continuously monitor relevant climate variables, including the depth to which meltwater percolates, at the Camp Century site. 2. To regularly update annual likelihoods of meltwater interacting with abandoned materials at the Camp Century site over the next century. 3. To map the estimated spatial extent and vertical depth of abandoned wastes across the Camp Century site. 4. To publicly report all findings from the Camp Century Climate Monitoring Programme in a timely manner.

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.

FCE to demo DFC300 system at US Army base in California

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.