What We Do

Contextual Sediment Management

Instead of relying on traditional maintenance dredging to transport sediment, Contextual Sediment Management works with natural processes, forms, or systems to convert sediment management into a productive process that can create critical wetland habitat, improve water quality, support local economies, and greatly reduce the cost and environmental impacts from dredging.

Three principles guide our approach and challenge us to blur the lines between human and nature and commerce and community across disciplines, sectors, and administrative boundaries.

Focus on time-based work with natural materials, assemblages, and systems

We are informed by landscape architecture practices. Working with natural objects takes time and creativity, but this approach can be more affordable than capital-intensive construction processes that begin to lose effectiveness from day one.

Human benefits and ecosystem health are coupled and are not adversarial

Human and natural ecosystems are connected. Changes to one affect the other. We see the big picture to arrive at practices that produce shared outcomes that consider the complexity of ecosystems in full, including ecology, community, and economy. This is based on theory and practice emerging from landscape architecture concepts and techniques.

Sediment itself crosses sectors and jurisdictions and forms its own constituency

Sedimentary projects need methods for more comprehensive work that crosses disciplines, sectors, and administrative boundaries. Sediment is an agent that binds together commercial, social, and environmental interests at multiple scales. Instead of viewing sediment as a problem or nuisance, we can consider it a beneficial material for coastline management.

Contextual Sediment Management