Summary
Reefense seeks to develop self-healing, hybrid biological and engineered reef-mimicking structures to mitigate the coastal flooding, erosion and storm damage that increasingly threaten civilian and DoD infrastructure and personnel.
Under Reefense, custom wave-attenuating base structures will promote calcareous reef organism (coral or oyster) settlement and growth, which will enable the system to self-heal and keep pace with sea level rise over time. A system will be put in place that will also attract non-reef building organisms necessary to help maintain a healthy, growing system.
Finally, adaptive biology (other than genetically modified organisms) will enable improved coral and oyster resilience against disease and temperature stress, to ensure compatibility with a changing environment.
The Reefense strategy includes employing recent innovations in materials science, hydrodynamic modeling, adaptive biology, and multiple effectors to develop growing structures that are optimized to rapidly implement coastal defenses suited to a changing environment.
By co-designing structures with biology such that they can be rapidly deployed to provide immediate protection and then persistently facilitate the growth of calcareous organisms, the protective Reefense structures will be rapidly enhanced by what would normally require decades of biological structure-building, but which can be achieved in a matter of months to years.