Mayra A. Roman-Rivera

University of Tennessee at Knoxville | UTK · Department of Geography

GIS students and faculty at the University of Tennessee are engaged in a long-standing and ongoing community-academic partnership with the Beck Cultural Exchange Center, a local African-American-led nonprofit heritage advocacy organization. The partnership supports the Beck’s development of a “Black restorative cartography” that carries out the mem...

Nearshore bars are important coastal features that influence beach-dune dynamics and protect the coast from high-energy wave events. Historically, in situ methods were used to study beach-dune dynamics and nearshore bars. Video monitoring systems, such as Argus, have been the favored remote sensing approach for studying nearshore bars dynamics and...

In many places along the U.S. East and Gulf of Mexico coasts, barrier islands are the first line of defense against extreme weather events threatening our coastlines. The trademark of these barrier islands are sand dunes that are intricately bound, from a sedimentary perspective, to the beach. Coastal storms, such as Hurricanes Matthew (2016), Irma...

Over one-third of the Earth’s population resides or works within 200 km of the coast. The increasing threat of coastal hazards with predicted climate change will impact many global citizens. Coastal dune systems serve as a natural first line of defense against rising sea levels and coastal storms. This study investigated the volumetric changes of t...

The purpose of this study is to document the geomorphic evolution of a mechanical dune over approximately one year following its installation and compare it to the recovery of a natural dune following the impact of Hurricane Matthew (2016). During the study period, the dunes' integrity was tested by wave and wind events, including king tides, and a...

Nearshore bars are important morphologic features associated with intermediate and dissipative natural beaches. Bars impact the direction, magnitude, and patterns of sediment transport in the nearshore. They serve as a buffer against extreme and meso-scale events. In this review article, we investigate remotely-based observations, specifically near...

Over the last decade the concept of "king tides" has become a common colloquial term to describe higher than normal high tides. The terminology originated in 2009, when Australia experienced their highest seasonal tides in almost 20 years. In response, a public engagement program, "The King Tides Project," was formed that has since spread globally....

Coastal features and processes interact with each other, producing complex patterns of shoreline changes in different beach segments. Coastal dune systems have been studied in detail, looking at their evolution through time, sediment budget and aeolian processes but few researches have combined the studies of the processes that occur in the nearsho...