Peter Ruggiero Oral History Interview, December 14, 2017

ELIZABETH THORLEY: Today is December 14, 2017. We're here at the Valley Library with Dr. Peter Ruggiero, a professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. Today we're going to talk about your career and research as it relates to global warming. First, I like to start out with your background. Where were you born?

PETER RUGGIERO: I was born in New York City, but I only lived in New York for a couple years and then we moved to New England. I grew up primarily in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

ET: What did your parents do?

PR: My mother was a schoolteacher my whole life and my father worked for AT&T for about 40 years.

ET: What were your interests growing up? Did you spend time outdoors?

PR: Yep. We did a lot of things outdoors as a family. We skied and camped but a lot of my interests stemmed from spending time on the beach and sailing. We always had a sailboat. When we lived in Connecticut we sailed on a lake and then we moved to Massachusetts and I sailed in the greater Boston Harbor area, and so 00:01:00spent a lot of time on the water, a lot of time on beaches, both in the area of soft shore Boston and Cape Cod as well.

ET: Were you initially interested in going into engineering and science as a child?

PR: No. Probably didn't think much about career as a child but just enjoyed all of those kinds of activities, probably like a lot of kids who could have excelled in math and sciences in high school had guidance counselors that said well you should go try engineering as a degree and so I went to Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and quickly picked civil engineering just because of the ability to work in water, kind of thinking I was going to do something in fluid mechanics or hydraulics. Then I think it was the end of my sophomore year when I realized there were actually classes on the course syllabus called Coastal Engineering and I had never even heard of it or thought 00:02:00it could be a potential profession. I think starting along taking those classes really changed everything for me.

ET: Were you exposed to undergraduate research there?

PR: A little bit, yes. Not in a very significant way but the professor who taught that class, coastal engineering, I took the course from him and immediately knew this is what I wanted to pursue and was deciding between getting a job after undergraduate or continuing on to grad school, so I did a special projects class with that professor as well. It was a little bit of research. We did some work in a wave tank. We used some video techniques to measure waves. As I said, it wasn't very sophisticated. It didn't turn into a publication or any presentations, but it was a lot of fun and learned a lot more about coastal processes and I think it was one of the major reasons I decided to pursue graduate school rather than getting a job after undergrad.

ET: Did you plan on pursuing a Ph.D. initially?

PR: Nope. Definitely not. Like a lot of things in my career, kind of things just sort of happened to get me to where I eventually got. But I came to OSU and did a master's degree in the early '90s and I was in the Coastal and Ocean Engineering program at the time and absolutely I was here for a masters only. They couldn't have paid me to do a Ph.D. at the time. But when I started taking classes and getting exposed to the research that my colleagues were doing, other students, the professors here at OSU and particularly getting involved in some of the work that was happening at the College of Oceanography at the time, I realized that if I could stay and continue for the degree, I would be happy to. I was lucky to get that opportunity.

ET: How did you decide on Oregon State?

PR: Lots of options. With an undergraduate in civil engineering, I applied to 00:04:00probably the 5 or so primary coastal engineering schools in the country and had a couple of offers from different places, but I had spent a little bit of time in the Pacific Northwest. I actually spent a summer in Seattle, and it was primarily just place, not necessarily the faculty per se or the program, although that was all fantastic. It was really just wanting to come to the Pacific Northwest at the time.

ET: What were your initial impressions of Corvallis when you first arrived?

PR: I loved it. From the second I got here I loved everything about it.

ET: What does your background in civil engineering contribute to your research in coastal morphology compared to say an oceanographer?

PR: Yeah, that's a great question.

I've always maintained that to do work in the near shore area where you're focused on morphological evolution, you kind of need to have the three-legged stool of knowing something about coastal engineering, something about near shore 00:05:00oceanography and also kind of coastal geology as well and so I think all three of those disciplines feed into understanding near shore processes and really sediment transport and morphological evolution at the coast. But I would say to really answer your question, the engineering background has made me have more of an applied focus than maybe a lot of people with more of a pure science background. The vast majority of my work is user inspired or use inspired. You know, really kind of thinking along the lines of providing information that can be used for decision making to reduce coastal hazards, so it's been focused on, very applied from the beginning. I think the engineering background has a lot to do with that.

ET: Did you teach while you were a grad student at OSU?

PR: A little bit. I TAed probably a little bit less than half the time I was a Ph.D. candidate and I wouldn't really call it teaching. I would call it grading 00:06:00and running labs and things like that, occasionally giving guest lectures. I never taught a course and I think that was, again, the circuitous route of my career. I really didn't have much of a desire to stay in academia after a Ph.D. I think during the time that I was here I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do but when I was given the opportunity to work at a state agency after I graduated that was along the lines of applied work doing work that was ideally going to be used for making decisions for coastal management. That was the motivation here. While I did have that TA experience there wasn't a lot of teaching involved at the time.

ET: Your grad research was on model and coastal change, is that correct?

PR: It was a little bit of that. It was developing approaches to understand when erosion and flooding hazards would occur. We developed an approach to thinking 00:07:00about total water bubbles on the coast. I actually did quite a bit of work measuring wave run-up on the coast using video techniques. Some of the first work looking at wave run-up on very high energy distributive beaches that we have here in Oregon and I got involved in some really neat experiments in the mid '90s to do that kind of work and then taking empirical models that we developed from the observational work, put that together with a fairly straightforward model that was able to predict how often dunes or cliffs or backshore protection structures would be impacted by high water levels at the coast.

ET: Was that computer simulation modeling or mathematical?

PR: It was pretty straightforward. Just kind of-a little bit of math involved. But I wouldn't say it was very sophisticated at the time.

ET: Was climate change already present in your mind at that point?

PR: It was. It was definitely present in our thinking, although I would say that at the time mid to late '90s there weren't a lot of very precise predictions, projections of what the impacts would be. I mean, people were thinking along the lines of sea level rise at the time, but the whole thinking that we have today about how to adapt to different scenarios, we were doing that kind of work back at the time, so we knew it was relevant to think about how high the water levels were, and we knew we could simply add some sea level rise projections to that. For my thesis, we actually didn't take that step. I think it was thought of at the time as too unknown, too wildly imprecise to really add to a scientific piece of work at that point. In hindsight, it would have been probably a nice thing to do is to add that climate change flavor to the work that we were doing at the time. It turns out today my students are using very similar techniques. 00:09:00It's only conceptually similar. It's a lot more sophisticated. But they're adding climate change variabilities and projections into that work, and I think they get a lot more out of it.

ET: So, after school you went to work for the Washington Department of Ecology?

PR: Yep, that's correct.

ET: What was that experience like transitioning, as you say to an applied science setting?

PR: It was great. On the one hand, very exciting, lots of new opportunities. It was also a little bit bizarre in the reason I was able to get a job at the Washington Department of Ecology at the time is there was just beginning a major new multi-year, multi-investigator study primarily funded by the U.S. Geological Survey but also by the state of Washington that was focused on the beaches north and south of the Columbia River, so in northwest Oregon and southwest Washington. That was the Southwest Washington Coastal Erosion Study.

When I was doing a Ph.D., finished my Ph.D., at AGU talks and thinks like that had met some scientists from the USGS and they were the ones that were building this study and they were able to connect me with a colleague, George Kaminsky, at the Washington State Department of Ecology. When he was hired in the late, maybe the early '90s he was the primary coastal engineer for the entire state of Washington. But his interests were primarily in the outer coast of the Washington Coast and had seen that there was a lot of hot spot erosion occurring in the mid to, I guess, the early to mid '90s and it was fairly unexplained. The Washington coast hadn't had a lot of studies done on it and part of that because not many people live there or lived there at the time and also because a lot of that coastline is actually building out fairly rapidly with sediment from the Columbia River. There was a lot of huge need to understand the typical details 00:11:00that are usually pretty obvious, like which ways that longshore sediment is going. I think at the time in the mid '90s we actually didn't know how to answer that question. The USGS and the state of Washington put their resources together and initiated starting in '96, '97 this pretty major study. From the ability of a newly minted Ph.D. to get out of grad school and land a situation like that to be able to develop a monitoring program for the state of Washington that had data that had not been collected before, there was a lot of newness and excitement, a lot of interesting and smart scientists from around the country and even around the world were coming to this location for meetings and things like that. There was a lot of excitement. It was also a little bit odd because we were trying to do coastal geomorphology research in a state agency that was primary involved in managing coastlines, not doing research. We were a little bit of an odd ball entity. We called ourselves the coastal mapping and analysis program sea map. We were known as the mavericks in the agency. I think I did a 00:12:00lot of things wrong in terms of purchasing new equipment. I didn't do a lot of things correctly from the agency's perspective. But at the same time, I was having a lot of fun and we started a beach monitoring program in the summer of 1997 that this past summer, the summer of 2017, was the end of the 20th year of that program. It's been really nice to watch a data set that I helped begin that long ago continue to this day.

ET: What are your impressions of it at this point now that it's wrapped up, I guess in terms of learning from that experience? It sounds like you feel satisfied to some extent with it?

PR: Yeah, the Southwest Washington Coastal Erosion Study was really a great, at the time we called it interdisciplinary research and that's because we had a geologist and an engineer on the same team, where maybe someone that looked at 00:13:00coastal processes. Even today's day and age we'd have to have a social scientist on the team and an ecologist on the team to have it be thought of as truly interdisciplinary research. But it was a great study. As I said because of the fact that there hadn't been much done in Southwest Washington in terms of understanding the history of those beaches and trying to make projections of those beaches we had kind of this wide-open slate, and I think we accomplished quite a bit, published quite a bit on it. It was a very satisfying experience. That said, the monitoring program is still going. I'm still publishing and having students analyze data from work that we started over about 20 years ago when I first went to the state of Washington, so that's been a lot of fun as well.

ET: You mentioned USGS? I saw that you're a USGS Mendenhall Research Fellow?

PR: [Nods].

ET: Did that help fund part of this research, or is that a separate project?

PR: It actually helped me continue on, but I also was able to branch out and do a few other things at the time. I worked for the state of Washington for about 4 1/2 years or so. I think the southwest Washington and coastal region study hadn't ended yet but it was kind of winding down and as I said before kind of being a research first person at that state agency was a kind of an oddball thing and so I was looking for other opportunities and the colleagues that I had been working with from the USGS had this opportunity to go work as a postdoc in their group for a couple of years and so that was sort of an easy transition to make. I moved from Olympia, Washington to San Francisco and worked in the Menlo Park office. That was a Mendenhall postdoc for 2 years and then became a research geologist for the USGS for about 3 years after that.

That was sort of my career trajectory, as I had decided that I was going to work 00:15:00for the USGS instead of the state agency. Still, academia was the furthest thing from my mind at the time. Because of working with the same people and having the flexibility of that Mendenhall those first couple of years that I was at the USGS, I was able to work on southeast Washington data sets, continued to collect data in the summer, published some more work on something that we've been working on for the last several years, the previous several years. It enabled me to continue to work on that quite a bit.

ET: What was your impression of USGS as an agency to work for?

PR: It was great. I loved it. My way in the door was as a Mendenhall postdoc and then I was lucky enough to apply for and get a permanent track position as a research geologist there. I've always said that in terms of coastal and marine geology groups around the country if you put together there now in Santa Cruz-the west coast group. There's a St. Petersburg, Florida, group and a Woods 00:16:00Hole, Massachusetts group, it's kind of the biggest critical mass, the best coastal geologist in the country, if not the world. There put into those three groups but they all do work together. So, there was a lot of great people to work with, typically resources to do interesting work, and as I said, I have done a ton of work in my career in Washington and Oregon, but when I was at the USGS I was able to work in a couple of other places, like Alaska, North Carolina, and California obviously with the Sumatra after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. So, had lots of great opportunities there. It was a blast.

ET: Can you talk a little bit more about that experience, going to Sumatra?

PR: Sure, yeah, that was wild. I've never really spent a lot of time focusing on tsunami hazards as part of my career. I focus on coastal hazards, but primarily chronic hazards which are more the individual storms that occurred during normal 00:17:00winters in the west coast and then El Ninos and the sea level rise and changing patterns and ETETET on top of that. So, I've never been really focused on tsunamis, but I had several of my colleagues at the USGS they had this approach where they would go wherever in the world a major tsunami had occurred if it was big enough to cause significant inundation and then lay down a sediment deposit on the surface of a coastal plain, they would go and analyze that sediment deposit. The idea was, and still is, is if you can say something based on the way the sediments are laid down, in terms of how they are coarse and are fine in the sediment column and the number of waves that caused them to be deposited-if you can say something about the modern-day tsunami deposits, then you can look back into paleo cores of old tsunamis and say more about them in terms of not 00:18:00just the frequency of the events but also the magnitude and how devastating they might have been. Scientists have used around the world information in cores about sediments to you know deduce basically, for example in Oregon in the Pacific Northwest that we have these major Cascadia zone mega tsunamis and associated with that there are these deposits laid down in the muds and the sands, etc. They were able to determine the last even that we had was in 1700, and basically between sediment analyses in the land as well as in the sea, can put together the late whole scene history basically of how often these events actually happen. But from those sediment deposits it's been difficult to figure out what the magnitude is. The idea is if you study a modern-day tsunami, when 00:19:00we actually know a lot more about the waves because we have some measurements or we have video, have a lot of quick information about how high the water was based upon markers on trees, high water lines, etc., then you can actually connect the hydrodynamics that we know pretty well to this modern-day sediment despot and then infer, based on the paleo sediment deposits, what the hydrodynamics might have been with those paleo tsunamis. It's a very important piece of work. All that said, I basically went as a field tech because this was not my main piece of interest, but one of the things that I have done quite a bit of in my work on the coast is collect near-shore bathymetry. When I say near-shore bathometry I mean basically the underwater typography of the coastline, kind of between the sub areal beach and then to deeper water depths 00:20:00than what the beach is annual changing on a yearly basis.

We've developed techniques to do this with GPS and echo sounders on personal watercrafts, basically jet skis. I had done a lot of work measuring that bathometry in very shallow environments, which is pretty much of a specialty 15, 20 years ago. A lot of people do it now. I was able to bring that technology with me a few months after the Sumatra event, we went to in March 2005. My job with the other USGS colleagues would go on land and they'd be out there in 90-degree weather, baking on these coastal plains, digging in the mud collecting sediment, I was on a small skiff you know just bombing around the in the near shore collecting near show bathometry. I had by far the best job. It was actually really exciting, where we were able to collect evidence of a sediment deposit underwater that had been laid by the tsunami during its strong down phase. One of the things that I've spent a lot of time studying is just typical sandbars that are pretty much always underwater and they move around with storms 00:21:00and waves and seasonally, but this deposit that we found that we mapped was in about 12 liters of water, which is much deeper than any normal sandbar was, and we mapped it in the longshore about a kilometer or two, and we were pretty sure that it was a kind of a temporary morphological feature that was developed by this tsunami. But subsequent modeling efforts bore that out and we went back in 2007 to the same location, made the same kinds of measurements and that deposit was no longer there. That sediment had been distributed along the rest of the coastal shelf. It was kind of a cool finding that I was part of, I was part of going to Indonesia following that event. It was exciting for other reasons, like getting shot at by the military and things like that. That's a different story.

ET: Wow, do you want to explain that further, or?

PR: I don't know the history in a huge amount of detail, but we were in the northwest region of Sumatra, Banda Aceh, and that was an area that prior to this event there had been a civil war for many years and there had been a ceasefire for the immediate few months after that between the government-led military and the GAM who were the rebels and I think we showed up around 3 1/2 or so months after the event, after a lot of the lifesaving and immediate emergency response was taken care of. We came in to do the science, but I think at that time the ceasefire was breaking down and there was distrust between the rebels and the government. We had rented a surf charter boat, and it was pretty rare for such a 00:23:00nice boat to be this area. This was an area where not a lot of westerners came pretty much ever. Here we were in this surf charter boat and I had this very nice skiff that I was collecting my near shore bathometry in and at one point there was a bunch of, there was a group of military but they're basically 17-year-old kind of Rambo loving looking kids and they were on land and they were trying to get my attention but I never noticed them and I think they were shooting these warning shots over the boat and I kept on hearing what I thought was just the engine backfiring, so I kept on stopping the boat and checking the engine and didn't see anything wrong and then my colleagues finally got me on the radio and said you got to stop. The story they told me is the warning shots were angled like this and then like this and then like this [shows hand vertically moving horizontally]. So, we left the area after this event. We went to an island off shore.

ET: You're in California working or USGS, what inspires you to return to academia?

PR: Good question. It was basically just a family decision at the time. I had good job offers here. Wasn't really looking, but the opportunity to come back to Corvallis came up and so I took the opportunity.

ET: Were you happy to return to Oregon State in particular?

PR: I was definitely happy to return to Corvallis and Oregon State to some extent, although I left a USGS kind of permanent position and started as a research faculty, basically having to raise 9 months of my salary each year with grants and so I panicked for the first three years that I was here trying to do that, just trying to get my foothold. I'm not sure how much I enjoyed the first couple years and how pleasant it was to be back at OSU, but I had been gone for almost a decade, so it was really nice to come back.

ET: How did it feel being in CEOAS as opposed to civil, this time?

PR: Well, actually at the time it wasn't CEOAS. I was in the geosciences department, which was still in the College of Science. I worked closely with folks in CEOAS. It was just the College of Oceanography at the time, the Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences. The merger to bridge geosciences and COAS didn't occur-that was about 6 or 7 years ago now. I had already been here for about 5 years.

ET: Were there people important to helping you get settled in when you returned?

PR: Yeah, absolutely. I think many people made it possible and made it much smoother than it would have been otherwise, and I owe them a huge amount of thanks. Maybe first and foremost would be Rob Holman who was somebody that I worked with. He wasn't my major advisor for my Ph.D., but he was somebody that I 00:26:00worked in his lab and he was definitely a mentor for me, and so he I think pulled some strings with deans and you know he did a lot of behind the scenes work to help me get back here, which was great. Then there was several other people, both in kind of oceanography as well as in engineering, Tuba Ozkan-Haller and Mira Collar both helped a lot. Dan Cox was great as well. Dan actually gave me a part of a project he was already working on. He was the director of the wave lab at that time and had a sea grant project looking at dune erosion. He offered me the ability to have a month or two of salary on that and take over the design of what we're going to do in terms of the experiment and so without those kinds of initial kindnesses by faculty here it would have been a much rougher go of it. So, they were great.

ET: It sounds like you still worked pretty closely with people in the College of Engineering?

PR: Yeah, that's one thing we've always loved about doing coastal research here 00:27:00at Oregon State, starting from the time that I was a student. As I said I was in the coastal ocean engineering group at the time, but actually my co-advisor was Paul Komar who was in Oceanography and I actually spent a lot of time in Ron Holman's lab, in his coastal imaging lab, and other students that I had come in to OSU with, and the engineering program did the same thing. We've always had this low disciplinary boundary between those two groups and that's maintained I think probably more so today. I advise engineers now and I'm on the committees of students that are advised by engineering faculty and vice versa and we all work together and we're all good friends. It works out really well.

ET: Did you teach when you first arrived?

PR: Let's see, I got here in almost a little bit less than 12 years ago, and I 00:28:00think I probably didn't have to teach for about 6 to 9 months. I'm trying to think exactly how it was, but yes within a year I was teaching. I was actually given the opportunity to design a couple of classes to teach and so the first class I taught was a coastal geomorphology class and actually that's not true. I taught the first term I was here, the spring term, but I kind of co-taught a class that was already on the books that Rob Holman was teaching, and it was a, we called it at the time beach processes and sedimentation or something like that. It became nearshore sediment transport after teaching it with Rob a couple of times. Anyway, that was one of the things that I did when I first got here was teach that class, but then in terms of classes that I developed, I developed a coastal geomorphology and then eventually a coastal hazards class which I alternate every year.

ET: How do you perceive teaching since it sounds like you didn't initially 00:29:00anticipate returning to academia and becoming a teacher?

PR: I was absolutely horrified. I think that was part of the main reason why I never wanted to be an academic, because I thought teaching would be too hard, too scary. Just having to face students constantly. I love it. It's a blast and it's one of the best parts of the job. But it's a struggle because I have many people, NCOs, not all of us, but there's a lot of folks in our college that have jobs that are predominantly research oriented and we still have to raise a good amount of money for our salary through grants and our research programs, and so the teaching is always-trying to find time for both and being successful at both is definitely a tricky thing but it's great to have the diversity and job. But I teach about a class, a class and a half per year.

But I would say when I first got here and had to teach within a month after showing up it was definitely a stressful part of the transition for me.

ET: It sounds like there are a few elements of stress at that time.

PR: Yeah, right.

ET: You touched on the data gathering process, but I was wondering if maybe you could elaborate a little more on how you gather data for your models and maybe how that technology has changed through your career in terms of modeling beach morphology?

PR: Yeah, great question. It was interesting. When I was in graduate school was around the time that GPS technology was just becoming accurate enough and I won't say cheap enough-only a handful of groups could afford getting their hands on real-time kinematic GPS that you can actually get that onto a few centimeters worth of accuracy, the horizontal and the vertical. I was lucky enough that when I was at OSU Rob Holman's lab purchased equipment like that and then started 00:31:00putting it on things like beach buggies and backpacks and small boats in the nearshore. I think as I was coming up starting to develop techniques that I wanted to use, particularly when I went to the state of Washington and developed the state's beach monitoring program, this new technology was ripe to be exploited for these different kinds of purposes. I think that the thing that I contributed to was taking these techniques that people were using for maybe focus field experiments to support hydrodynamic measurements or maybe one or two study sites they started to repeat measurements at, we tried to take the approach of we wanted to understand a region so this area that the southwest Washington coast erosion study encompassed was about 160 kilometers of coastline 00:32:00from Tillamook at Oregon to Point Granville, Washington and so we divined a beach change monitoring program that involved collecting data throughout all four seasons. It was very nested in the fact that we had some techniques that we did high resolution everywhere. Other techniques, because they were too time consuming or more expensive or just physically more difficult, we only did occasionally once a summer, that kind of thing. But I would say that a lot of those techniques were still using them in general. It's still real time kinematic GPS equipment with an onboard computer and a single beam echo sounder. All the components of that are several generations better. They don't break down as much. The integration of it all is much better than it used to be. We're mapping things with high resolution and higher frequencies and so the data sets have just become better and better and more precise. But in general, the 00:33:00techniques that we started working with 20 years ago it's actually still fairly efficient to use those techniques as well.

That said, there are many other techniques that are being used and my group uses them as well, but those GPS based techniques are still sort of the workhorse. Once you have that equipment and made that investment it's pretty straightforward to go to the coastline, put a backpack on with a GPS unit and walk a beach profile and you're comparing to something that's been collected many dozens of times over the years. That's pretty nice. I guess simple changes-we used to have this setup of very expensive base station over a known monument. We don't have to do that anymore because there's continuously operating networks of stations that the states run, so we can just plug into that. We can go to a new site, and not have to worry so much about geodetic control, etc. So, things are a lot more efficient. But you know there's many new 00:34:00techniques, particularly remote sensing techniques. My group has dabbled with using drones to collect beach change data and many other groups are doing that with a lot more effort than we have, but that's how the technologies are changing and everything's becoming cheaper and, in some sense, easier to mobilize. That said, using a drone to measure 160 kilometers of coastline, like the southwest Washington coastal erosion study, I think I would still use a lot of these techniques that we have been using for 20 years rather than the newer technology because we can use them in all kinds of weather, you don't need as much permitting, you don't have to ask for permissions, not a lot of planning goes into it, but it's still fairly expensive and fairly time extensive as well.

ET: Is Lidar a useful tool for you?

PR: Absolutely. I didn't mention it primarily because I'm not involved in the 00:35:00collection of Lidar, but I certainly am a consumer and all of my students have consumed and used Lidar data. That's been fantastic. Again, I just take it for granted because I think it's around that time of the mid to late '90s is when Lidar came on because of the advent of these GPS being useful and more affordable, so why not just throw it on an airplane with a Lidar unit and then you'd get spatially located point clouds of data. When I first went to the Washington Department of Ecology it was the summer or spring of 1997 and that was the beginning of the major El Nino of '97-'98. One of the things that the USGS and NASA and NOA did was fly a good chunk of the U.S. west coast in the fall of '97 and then the spring of '98 to get a before and after shot of what 00:36:00the El Nino response was, and the monitoring program that we set up was to resolve that process as well but with a lot more time demand resolution, because we did it much more frequently, but having Lidar in that sense it was twice in a year, but it's been every couple of years now for 20 years or so. It's fantastic. We could start a new project, like I have a project now in North Carolina on the outer banks and before to figure out the coastal evolution of a system over the last couple of decades, if you didn't have beach profiles, you'd just rely on shoreline positions that might have been based on interpretations of aerial photographs. Now we have about a dozen Lidar data sets that have been collected in the last couple of decades and so it's not just analyzing one line of the sand, it has a huge amount of variable and uncertainty associated with it. We have the full beach profile, at least the subaerial beach profile. All it 00:37:00takes is writing good enough code to extract the features that we care about and mapping the morphological evolution. It's spectacular.

ET: Can you talk about your research on the outer banks?

PR: Sure, that's a very cool collaboration. It's truly interdisciplinary work, because there's an ecologist on the team, many ecologists on the team, actually. It's work that I'm doing with Sally Hacker's group here. She's in the integrative biology group. We have a colleague in the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Laura Moore, who's also a coastal geomorphologist. Basically, all three of our groups are interested in sand dunes. I'm interested in all kinds of different parts of coastal geomorphology but recently there's been a lot of work focused on sand dunes, and the general idea is that we've 00:38:00noticed in many systems, and Sally and I have worked on this extensively in the Pacific Northwest that the shape of the dune and how dunes are formed through time is often dependent upon the grasses that grow on them. It's a function of how the grasses trap sand and they have different efficiencies in terms of how they trap sand, and then how the grasses themselves respond to being buried by sand. This very cool ecomorphodynamic feedback of sand blowing up the beach, being trapped by these grasses that are salt tolerant and burial tolerant, on the coastline and different grasses have these differing growth habits. So, this feedback plays out. So, different species result in differently shaped dunes. We've seen that on the west coast and the idea was to go to North Carolina and test some of those hypotheses. There's different grass species there. It's very 00:39:00different kinds of systems and try to understand the role of grass in terms of building dunes and how beaches and dunes recover following storms and how the role of the grass is involved in that recovery. Coastal sand dunes are the primary line of defense for high water levels and flooding during big storms, etc., so having a significant backshore elevation that is a sand dune prevents the backshore, whether it's an ecosystem or infrastructure from being flooded. Understanding the details of the processes involved in the recovery after events and just dune building itself is pretty key. That's the work that we're doing there.

ET: Would you say there are beneficial aspects, from what I understand, on the Oregon coast of non-native grass species restrict dune growth or movement?

But it sounds like there's a benefit to that from humans living on the coast?

PR: Yeah. That's a very interesting almost dilemma in terms of the tradeoffs. We call these ecosystem services. These grasses are ecosystems engineers and the way they help shape the geomorphology of the coastline provides a variety of services, and you can think of that in services to humans or things that we value. One of which, a pretty important one, and you asked about my engineering background earlier, I've been interested in coastal protection as a service for a long time. As I was just saying, the higher the sand dune the more you're protected from high water levels during flooding events. That's often a very good thing. If I have a development and I want to be protected from high waters I want a sand dune. There's lots of tradeoffs there. In fact, these invasive species that pretty much now dominate the majority of sand dunes throughout 00:41:00Oregon and Washington they were brought in kind of these early infrastructure projects. People were building along the coast, trying to build communities and roads and transportation routes and a lot of the coastal sand dunes, sand was blowing all over the place. They were not very stabilized. The native grass species is a good sand trapper, but the way it grows it kind of grows in clumps and it forms very hummocky three-dimensional dunes and it's easy for sand to blow through and around it. So, people that were trying to establish communities were constantly fighting against getting buried by sand and having roads getting buried by sand, and so they on purpose brought in an invasive species. First it was this European beach grass that is a great sand binder and it's been known to build big foredunes all over the world. A few decades later another invasive species in American beach grass came in and basically, they did their job. They 00:42:00were able to trap a lot of the sediment, build significant foredunes, and so really the whole shape of coastal foredunes along the Oregon and Washington coast is completely different now than it was prior to these invasive species coming in. As I said, they did their job. They were brought in to trap that sediment and it did that. We have fairly stable communities now, only a few places where sand blows into homes and onto streets. That's still a problem in some places, but there's a huge number of potential negative side effects to that, and one is many species of plants and animals are negatively impacted by having those big, tall foredunes.

A lot of Sally's work has been focused on this. The most famous one is the snowy plover, which is an endangered species, that prefers habitat, prefers the 00:43:00habitat of that open, low-lying coastal dune. They make their nests in the high beach backshore area. Just an indentation in the sand but they don't like having these big, tall dunes because it's more easy for predators to get to them, so their numbers have declined significantly. There's been a lot of programs in restoring sand dunes more toward the actual state, which is basically cutting down the dune, removing that invasive beach grass, some plantings of native species. That's one example of a species that did really poorly after the invasives came in. Pink sand verbena is another species that has done very poorly as well. There's several others. So, from an ecological perspective, there's been a negative impact. The other potential impact that's maybe harder to think about for people to live here in the valley, but if you have a home 00:44:00that part of your value for your home is looking out over the beach and the water and if that dune keeps growing taller and taller and eventually you can't actually see the water and the beach through this dune rapidly because it's a high sediment load and these species of grasses that build tall dunes, then that's a negative potential impact as well for some people. There's a lot of these different trade-offs in terms of ecosystem services that revolve around this dune problem.

ET: Can you talk about the Envision Project in Tillamook?

PR: Sure. That's a very exciting project. We've actually done a couple of these projects now where we finished working in Tillamook a couple of years ago and have been working in Gray's Harbor County in Washington and are finishing that project now.

This is a little bit of a departure from a lot of work that I've done in terms 00:45:00of this work has been very much stakeholder driven science. I said in the beginning that I've always thought of myself of being very applied and use inspired work, but I think over the years I've realized that I was doing science in the traditional way in terms of writing reports and peer reviewed articles and hoping it was going to be used by decision makers, even when I worked for the state of Washington, that was the Coastal Management Agency for the state of Washington, I don't think a lot of the work that I was doing was actually being-it was useful, basically. I could say it was the decision makers' fault, but it was actually my fault in terms of not asking them the right questions, not figuring out what form to put the data and the results in and so this work has been from the very beginning tried to be very stakeholder driven and the way 00:46:00we describe it is it's a process of coproduction of knowledge. So, we started several years ago in Tillamook County. It's an area that as far as the Oregon coast goes, it's primarily dune backed, although there are several areas that have significant erosion problems that have been faced with putting in engineering structures to protect their backshore, because the dunes were getting eroded and getting overtopped. In areas that were eligible to put our engineering structures they were doing that. The county in general, but a couple of communities, in particular Neskowin, had been really grappling with the options of dealing with coastal erosion, coastal flooding both in today's climate but also thinking everything we hear this might be getting worse if sea levels rise and storms patterns are continuing to maybe evolve. We had a ripe 00:47:00group of stakeholders to get together with and talk through what their values were, what kinds of things they enjoyed about the coastline, and the problems as they saw them now and thinking through if things were perfect how would this coastline look in 20-30 years and how can we get there? What kind of adaptation strategies might get us to that point? If you can imagine different people, whether they're agencies or government officials or just local citizens or working from NGOs, will have different perspectives on that. The Envision Project have allowed us to develop a series of adaptation strategies or call them policy scenario narrative in terms of groupings of different ideas of strategies to deal with coastal erosion, coastal flooding, and then to evaluate them quantitatively in a model called Envision.

You refer to the Envision Project and we have different names for these projects, but Envisioning Alternative Futures is one way we refer to it. Envision is a modeling tool that was developed and overseen by John Bolte's group in the biological and ecological engineering program and it's basically a GIS based scenario analysis tool. It's very spatially explicit. We can get down to the scale of individual tax lots mapped out in this modeling tool. We know where all the existing infrastructure is and road networks. We use Lidar data as the digital elevation model and knowing all kinds of information about the beach slope and the dune heights and things like that that are relevant for coastal change modeling. When we started this project in Tillamook County, we were developing these scenarios and strategies with stakeholders about what they 00:49:00thought they wanted the coast to look like in a couple of decades, these different alternatives in terms of getting there, so those are things like continuing to armor, to protect infrastructure. Another way of thinking about the world would be to work with nature and to move away from the coast, so potentially if you figure out where the money would come from developing easement, such that if an area is getting impacted by hazards on a repetitive basis, instead of defending the infrastructure, moving that infrastructure back out of harm's way and no new development would be built within a hazard done and be quantified in a variety of different manners. The nice thing about the Envision tool is it allows you to play these games, basically, to develop these quantitative alternative futures.

As I said, all of the initial strategies came from our discussions with stakeholders and these are county commissioners, these are planning directors of the county, planning commission members, mayors of individual towns and then 00:50:00just interested citizens, and motivated citizens. We wound up modeling I think six individual sets of scenarios and each one of those scenarios has anywhere between a handful to a dozen of individual policies that are implemented. At the base, we spent a lot of time at the end of the first year or two implementing fairly straightforward coastal hazard models into Envision and Envision had never been applied to the coast before. It had been used in other environments, like forests and streams and things like that. But it's very sectoral independent. It can be applied anywhere, just the idea is to think through different scenarios to get a group of stakeholders to think what alternative futures might look like. We developed this approach on these relatively simple coastal hazards model, basically quantifying flooding, quantifying erosion and then developed a whole series of metrics, basically measuring sticks, which the 00:51:00stakeholders can say ah, this is how well I'm getting towards my goal of wanting to have less structures being impacted by flooding but still a wide beach that I can walk and recreate on. We had to figure out ways to actually get to that point and what kind of policies would need to be implemented. If you're going to reduce infrastructure damage, you either have to build up a dune or armor it, but to keep the beach wide under sea level rise, you'd also have to nourish the beach. That means keeping track of the volumes that would get deposited out there and then potentially something about the cost of those actions as well. Doing this at the county basis we were able to see this is how much it would cost in what these different metrics that people were interested in, like beach accessibility, reduction in negative hazards for this particular scenario versus there was a scenario called hold the line, which as you can imagine was 00:52:00protecting infrastructure, but they also wanted to keep the beach. Then another scenario called the real line, which was moving back as sea level rose. I say as sea level rose, we implemented a series of sea level rise scenarios in this project as well. You can really by looking at the same metrics across these different scenarios you can compare and contrast if we implemented these strategies what it would look like. The quantitative numbers are not terribly precise. We can map at the tax lot level but really the idea is to get a general sense, kind of community to community and county as a whole. But it's an incredibly powerful approach for a community that is starting, they're grappling with problems. They're trying to think through how to save individual properties but also what's going to happen to this entire county under different scenarios to actually develop a quantitative tool, you can develop time series, you can 00:53:00develop visualizations. People can actually see the impact that human decision making might have on the landscape. It really helps people think through the impacts of their actions. It's very exciting work.

ET: How did working with a local Oregon county compare to working with a local Washington government organization?

PR: You mean when I was working back for the Washington Department of Ecology? Or this new work with Gray's Harbor?

ET: The Gray's Harbor, right.

PR: Well, there's been a lot of similarities and a lot of differences as part of the two projects. In fact, I just a student of mine defended her masters about a week ago that her analysis was comparing and contrasting these two approaches. I think originally, we maybe went into it with a hypothesis thinking they're only separated by a couple hundred miles. More or less the storm and water level 00:54:00forcing is similar. The geomorphology is not terribly different between the two places. We were going to invite the same people, you know, as I said county commissioners, mayors, planning directors, city engineers, those kinds of folk and more or less the same types came to both of these different projects, the meetings of the different projects. But there were a lot of differences. I think it reflects that each location has their own set of values. Some of it's just the vague reason of who comes to the meeting and who speaks up, but I think one thing that happened in Gray's Harbor County is we spent a lot more time focused on ecosystems and maintaining viable habitat for a variety of species and part of that was probably because we also worked in the actual bay Gray's Harbor itself.

Whereas in Tillamook the project we really set up from the beginning because it was our first time bringing Envision to an outer coast location, we're just 00:55:00going to look at the outer coast issues and we didn't look at the Tillamook Bay. I think that might have been part of the reason why there's some differences between the projects. I think there were a handful of similarities but also a sobering number of differences that made us realize that just scaling this project up we can't take the same 5 or 6 scenarios that we developed for Tillamook and run them for the rest of the Pacific Northwest and say we've really answered the problems involved in different stakeholders. To do this well, and I think that's just in general for any kind of science that is coproduced with stakeholders, you have to go through a long and involved process, multiple meetings. It's obviously harder to go to Gray's Harbor on a regular basis than it is to go to Tillamook because it's a lot closer to us, webinars, etc., staying in touch with the stakeholders is just less efficient when they're further away. We have less connections with different folks. But 00:56:00both projects have been incredibly rewarding. We're not quite done. We still have a few months left to finish up the Gray's Harbor work, but it's been very exciting.

ET: What was your experience like communicating scientific information to nonscientists?

PR: I would say it was great. I thought I did a very good job, but every time we came back from a meeting my students would tell me I talked too long, way too many plots. They didn't need to hear half of that information. So, I think I've learned throughout the years of doing this that you know less is more and getting the group to talk is most important in these exercises. Invariably the students give the best presentations and the most well-received at these stakeholder meetings that we have. But I mean to truly answer your question, the Gray's Harbor work has been funded by NOA but through the Climate Impacts 00:57:00Research Consortium, which is a group that its home is here in Corvallis at OSU, but it's a group of research from all of the region and its part of an NOA program called RISA. That whole program is really about coproducing knowledge, climate service knowledge in a variety of different sectors, etc. I've had lots of mentoring and lots of discussions about how to do this science communication. I feel like I'm getting better, but I was telling the truth the students that have come up realizing this they focus more on, they understand the necessity to be able to communicate your science well, and so I've done my best, but I've got a long way to go. It's a blast. It's interesting, but it takes a lot of time as 00:58:00well. It takes things that I sort of take for granted in terms of a science talk that I'll give at a typical meeting that I would attend with my work colleagues, I have to take a very different approach ad that takes a lot of time to prepare. You talk about the same material but from a stakeholder group to an AGU audience it's a very different set of slides, etc. But it's gratifying.

ET: How has your research working on it sounds like longer timescales affected your perspective on human caused climate change?

PR: I'm not sure how it's affected my perspective, but I think these Envisioning alternative futures projects, the fact that we're actually looking at multiple decades. We typically run the simulations out to the end of the century, even 00:59:00though by that point our ability to have any real certainty in terms of the projections is basically nothing, but what it does it allows us to see these end number differences between these scenarios. What I was referring to earlier, we have a scenario that might be hold the line, protect infrastructure; a scenario that is more about protecting ecosystems and habitat, etc.; and that's very different. If you're starting to look at the metrics, number of homes impacted by erosion, how accessible the beach is, whether it's razor clam habitat, after a decade or two you can't see a lot of differences between the metrics, but when you play it out for longer timescales you start to really see these differences.

ET: Okay. So, I think now I'll move to the final set of broader climate change questions.

PR: Sure.

ET: What were your earlier conversations on climate change like and have they 01:00:00shifted over time?

PR: I'm trying to remember my earliest conversations. I think probably the earliest conversations when I was in graduate school starting to study coastal processes and hearing about sea level rise projections and knowing that they were going to cause impacts to coastal communities and so the work that I was doing was relevant from that perspective, but I don't think I truly made the connection even 25 years ago as a student how much climate change would drive what I wound up doing eventually. By no means was I a pioneer in terms of bringing climate change impacts into my work. But I think I did finally get it when I was working for the state agency, the state of Washington, and seeing the problems that people in Washington were dealing with and I think we at the time 01:01:00were convinced that the vast majority of the erosion problems were being driven by sediment budget issues and you know changing patterns of sediment delivery from Columbia, sediment being trapped behind dams, and sediment not getting out to the coast during floods because of flood control work of the Columbia. But, seeing the variability of coastal change as driven by kind of a mild winter season versus a strong winter season and then in particular El Ninos. The first winter as I said that I went to the state of Washington was this very major El Nino season, '97-'98, was one of the top 3 El Ninos that we have had in the last many decades. I think originally, I was most focused on climate variability and then the climate change issues are easily added to the work that I was already 01:02:00doing thinking about climate variability.

ET: Can you speak about the community of climate change researchers here at OSU and maybe how the institution helps facilitate that collaborative research?

PR: Yeah, it's rich and deep and interconnected and I probably know a small percentage of people here working on climate change. I think that there's a very, very large number of folks where their work is somehow guided influence by climate change. I think my major connection has been through this Climate Impacts Research Consortium, so that's one of the groups that Phil Motes is the PI on. Phil's been good enough-we've actually known each other from the days that he was still in Washington and I was at the Washington Department of Ecology. When he got here and started building OCCRI and getting some of these 01:03:00early proposals, even though I was not a funded member of CIRC when it started, he knew that coastal impacts as driven by climate change would be an issue for the region and he brought me on and I was able to leverage some of my existing work with what CIRC was interested in and vice versa, so I've become a PI in that group. I think from my perspective, and the connections that I have to climate enterprise on campus, it's been mostly about impacts rather than fundamental drivers of global climate change, and so I've always been more interested-again back to this applied theme-with what are the impacts at the coastline and I've taken typically a regional perspective, but that could mean the whole west coast or it could be one particular beach depending upon the study and so there's a whole bunch of different people at OSU to draw on in 01:04:00terms of resources, models, et cetera, and so it's a very rich experience working on climate change issues here at OSU.

ET: Are you concerned about funding cuts to researching climate change given the current administration and if so how do you anticipate coping with that?

PR: That's a great question. Yeah, so I'm definitely concerned. Certainly, the first couple of draft budgets that came out in the beginning of the year, I'd say the vast majority of programs that have historically been funded were just zeroed out completely and that's things have evolved, and they are continuing to evolve, so I think there's definitely concern. In terms of coping, I think it's, I stick with what I know, and its coastal impacts due to climate change and climate variability.

The fact of the matter is, is that coastal communities are dealing with issues 01:05:00of flooding and erosion and are having to think through how to deal with that today and whether or not it's their government officials are thinking that it's climate change induced, these problems are not going away. Water levels are changing. Storm patterns are changing. Kind of stick with that approach and have a diverse funding portfolio, ideally. I can imagine being a primarily soft money funded researcher, that's definitely a concerning situation.

ET: Alright. What kind of policy changes would you like to see happen in the U.S. based on your experience?

PR: Well, I mean again I'll stick to the thing that I focus on in terms of policy and coastal policy in the region. One nice thing about the U.S. is that they never tried to have a one size fits all coastal management policy. Each 01:06:00state basically makes their own sets of rules and policies and I think for the most part that's actually a pretty good thing because of the diversity of issues and the diversity of geomorphology, diversity of foresting. We're not the Netherlands that is fairly finite and it's easier to have a national policy from that perspective. Of course, having state by state and community by community differences also has a lot of problems, but maybe not answer this in terms of policies that need to be implemented but I think the state of Oregon, the state of Washington and California as well are going to have to think through if they had existing rules on the books about who can and cannot defend their property with engineering solutions that that's going to cause a problem for the states and the people that are on the can't side of that ledger, if once the water level comes up high enough that those properties are having significant impacts 01:07:00those people are going to want to do something about it. That's just human nature. Unless a policy is implemented that allows for the buying out of properties and easements to be something that happens on a regular basis to move those properties back, which is going to cost a significant amount of money, and that's kind of the thing that there's very rarely political will to do, then the state's going to have to grapple with well what are we going to do when these people sue us for not allowing them to protect their property? They'll assume it's a takings kind of issue. I'm not presuming which policies should be implemented, I'm just saying the states need to be thinking about that now, because it happens on a case by case basis each winter during a major El Nino nowadays. But in a couple decades it's going to happen on a much more frequent basis. A couple of high-profile lawsuits might cause significant changes to coastal policy. In the past, Oregon's coastal policy's been fairly robust in 01:08:00terms of holding up against those kinds of demands, but we'll see what happens in the future. But I think having a better idea about when and where those issues are going to arise is important work that needs to happen right now. The more the state does about it, the better.

ET: What changes to public education do you think could help Americans better understand climate change or change their behavior?

PR: Yeah, that's a great question. I think one thing that we have noticed as part of the work that we've done with these Envision projects is that when you're examining the role of these different adaptation strategies versus the range of possible climate change impacts, so from a modest sea level rise to a very significant meter-plus sea level rise by the end of the century, was very 01:09:00surprised that the human adaptations, the human decision making actually makes a significant difference. In some case, governs the variability of the things that we care about in a couple of decades more so than the variability in climate scenario. Basically, what that means is humans have the efficacy to do something that is going to case a significant difference in the future in terms of protecting coastlines or keeping infrastructure out of harm's way. I think maybe getting that kind of information out to different levels. Obviously, I teach that in my classes at the university, but those are messages that get down to high schools and K-8 programs easily as well that we have the ability to make decisions at a whole bunch of different scales, my experience is in terms of this coastal adaptation stuff, but I think that's probably true in many sectors, that climate change is not the gloom and doom, the whole world's going to hell 01:10:00in a handbasket because the sea level's rising, there's nothing we can do about it. We actually can do some things about it and we can potentially you know whether that's protecting some of the structure for the time being but also keeping track of any potential negative impacts on ecosystems and if there are negative impacts mitigating against those. I think those messages can easily be gotten across in a more extensive manner.

ET: That kind of leads into my final question-are you hopeful about the future of the planet in the context of climate change?

PR: In the context of climate change-I'd say yes and no. I think the policies and the pulling out of the Paris Accord, the things that have happened in the last year or so make me less hopeful because we're losing time in terms of largescale mitigation that can slow done some of these things, but I'm also a relatively optimistic person and I do think that technology will help us in some 01:11:00aspects of this problem. I also think humans will use their ingenuity to adapt to the situation as necessary. I'd like to contribute to that being a fairly level of adaptation. But yes, I have 3 kids and I'd better be hopeful for their sake, so I'm relatively optimistic.

ET: Well, on that note that concludes our interview. Thank you for participating.

PR: Great. Thanks for having me.

ET: I appreciate your time.