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Mackerel Cove Beach sits on a thin strip of land that connects the north and south sections of Jamestown, adjacent to Beavertail Road and directly across from Sheffield Cove. In the last several years, storms have damaged the system of dunes behind the beach, allowing seawater to wash up onto the road and deposit sand into Sheffield Cove.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe dunes have been damaged by recent storms and the road has been closed several times,\u201d said Hongbing Tang, a 溏心vlog免费B站 landscape architecture professor who led the capstone class. \u201cThis was a very exciting project for the class. We wanted to help Jamestown restore the dunes but we also wanted to look at the Sheffield Cove side to improve accessibility.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n
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On a recent Tuesday morning, the students \u2013 divided into six teams \u2013 presented their final designs to several Jamestown officials, fellow students, faculty, and guest reviewers at the Higgins Welcome Center on the Kingston Campus. The ambitious designs provided a range of solutions to address coastal resiliency in the area. They also offered ideas for everything from parking and transportation, reinforcing the dunes with plantings, providing an ADA accessible kayak launch area and boardwalks and scenic lookouts for bird watching at Sheffield Cove, which is home to a town park, recreation area and an Audubon Society wildlife refuge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe considered the area holistically and provided different options from the most natural approach to the more radical,\u201d said Tang. \u201cWe also wanted to honor what the town people told us in a community workshop and in digital surveys.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maddie Ashenfelter, Lauren Vargas, Emma Curci and Evan Carlson focused on a design that honored what community members stressed in a public workshop \u2013 keeping the area \u201cbeachy\u201d while providing ideas to deal with sea-level rise and flooding. Their plan would raise the road 5 to 6 feet above its existing height at the low land in the center of the connecting road, matching the proposed dune height recommended by a 溏心vlog免费B站 ocean engineering and civil engineering capstone class. The plan would enhance coastal resilience against flooding and allow for views of the beach. Switchback walkways would protect the dunes from beach-goers trekking across them to get down to the beach. On the Sheffield Cove side, their design included a kayak launch with a ramp for easier access along with overlooks for birdwatching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Also adhering to residents\u2019 desire to preserve the area\u2019s natural beauty, Spencer Asofsky, Tim Purcel, and Stephanie Nordoff offered strategies that would address climate change while working with nature. They also proposed raising the road to the same dune height recommended by the engineering capstone class to protect from storm surge. In addition, they added several separate parabolic dunes to create a resilient dune system, along with dune walkover areas to improve ADA accessibility. To prevent beach erosion, they suggested an artificial reef of \u201creef balls\u201d filled with bagged oyster shells that would make waves break earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps the most radical approach was offered by Adam Giroux, Jay Giesen, and Sam Bowen, who proposed an elevated roadway that is 18 feet above sea level at its highest point. The design would also relocate parking to an area that would accommodate a bus stop and bike racks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAmong the damages caused by many of the storms we looked at, one thing that really stoodout to us was the disconnection between [the north and south sections] of Jamestown,\u201d said Bowen. \u201cWe thought that was the most important challenge here. And we took a bit of an ambitious approach.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jamestown Town Planner Lisa Bryer, who attended the presentation with Councilwoman Mary Meaher and Conservation Commission Chairwoman Anne Kuhn-Hines, said the students\u2019 designs were thoughtful, creative, and whimsical\u2013pushing the edges of what is possible. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe presentations were fabulous,\u201d she said. \u201cMultiple ideas stood out from the six different presentations. Each presentation had at least one nugget that was truly intriguing and worthy of further feasibility and potential implementation. I truly enjoyed the out of box thinking that the students provided as well as their ability to ground that thinking in reality of what would be acceptable to the community.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The integrated senior project was supported by a grant from Rhode Island Sea Grant, and was a collaborative endeavor with the ocean engineering\/civil engineering capstone class, who had proposed restoring and raising the dune system in their earlier study. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The landscape architecture capstone class, LAR445, brought together the skills and knowledge Tang\u2019s students have acquired in their four years at 溏心vlog免费B站 \u2013 putting them all in one, semester-long project. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The students visited Jamestown twice during the semester to do a field study and site analysis, and heard from several town officials and residents about dangers facing the area from sea-level rise and tidal flooding and the need to protect Beavertail Road \u2013 the only access to the southern peninsula of the island. The class also gathered input from residents during a community workshop that attracted about 60 people, along with two online surveys that received comments from another 150 community members. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ashenfelter said the project was a good choice, allowing the students to immerse themselves into solving a real-life problem facing coastal communities. \u201cThe site itself is very simple but the beach is in trouble. If it stays the way it is, the beach and road will be in great danger,\u201d she said. \u201cThe biggest part of the project was working through how to solve this problem \u2013 which is how future job projects may look.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAs a landscape architecture student, this project gave me the opportunity to work on a large-scale coastal site that directly supports community engagement, fosters ecological health, and promotes a sustainable future for Jamestown,\u201d added Asofsky. \u201cDesigning for such a dynamic environment challenged me to think critically about the long-term relationship between natural systems and human activity, as well as overall site functionality.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dealing with issues of coastal flooding and erosion haven\u2019t come up in the students\u2019 past design studios, making the Mackerel Cove project a unique opportunity, he said. \u201c溏心vlog免费B站 has done an excellent job of providing a diverse range of project experiences,\u201d said Asofsky, who will pursue a master\u2019s degree in coastal restoration and regenerative design at the University of Florida after graduation. \u201cBut this project has been especially valuable in preparing me for the next stage of my academic and professional journey.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This summer, Tang and two students will prepare a final report of the students\u2019 designs and send it to Jamestown officials. Bryer said the students\u2019 ideas will be used as a basis for discussions between town and state officials as they work on solutions for sea-level rise affecting Mackerel Cove and the surrounding area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cJamestown truly thanks the students and the 溏心vlog免费B站 faculty, staff and participants for their time and consideration in studying a truly complex and vitally important issue on our island,\u201d said Bryer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 May 13, 2025 \u2013 Starting this past winter, 19 aspiring landscape architects from the 溏心vlog免费B站 spent their senior capstone class researching and brain-storming to come up with landscape solutions to protect Mackerel Cove Beach and the surrounding area in Jamestown from sea-level rise and storm flooding. Mackerel Cove Beach […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":102159,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102158"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102167,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102158\/revisions\/102167"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}