Building seawalls to sustain intertidal biodiversity in altered and urbanized estuaries

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Increased urbanization along Australia's coasts is inevitable. The challenge is to achieve desired levels of development, while sustaining biodiversity. Coastal development increases the amount of shoreline which is altered from natural to built habitat. Seawalls have documented negative effects on intertidal biodiversity. There are, however, options in ways walls can be built, which may reduce these impacts. This project will explore the ways that different types of seawalls affects intertidal biodiversity, using existing sites and planned programmes of construction and repair of seawalls as experiments. This will ensure that recommendations from the research are economically and structurally sound, as well as environmentally valid.