Scientists from NCCOS' Beaufort Laboratory recently teamed up with The Nature Conservancy to create a new Living Shorelines application (app) by bringing in their research on the relationship between salt marsh distribution and shoreline wave energy in central coastal North Carolina. The app is an expansion of the Conservancy's Coastal Resilience tool, in development since 2007.

This tool can help coastal managers and residents identify where they can use a living shoreline as an erosion control strategy and determine which living shoreline approach is most suitable for a given site, while displaying the recommendations on the map. Using living shorelines to control erosion has been shown to improve water quality and ecological outcomes with the least impact to natural shorelines.