Welcome!

The University Of South Florida Coastal Research Lab conducts multi-disciplinary research on the coastal processes of the Gulf of Mexico and other areas.

Much of the work being undertaken at the Coastal Research Lab (CRL) is focused on three key areas of coastal geology: the process-response systems of beaches, inlets, and tidal sand bodies; coastal sediment transport processes and prediction; and the Holocene history and development of various coastal environments including barrier-island, tidal flat, and deltaic systems.

Our research includes both field- and laboratory-oriented efforts. Field research projects are primarily concentrated on the west coast of Florida, with some projects encompassing areas of Florida's east coast, the Florida panhandle, the Florida Keys, the southwest Florida shallow shelf, and coasts of the Caribbean Sea.

We also conduct numerical modeling of beach-inlet systems using the Coastal Modeling System (CMS) and DELFT3D.  The numerical modeling is applied as a major tool for several of the recently completed and ongoing inlet management studies.

Another area of our research encompasses geoscience education.  We developed a series of virtual field trips as part of a NSF-funded education research with a goal of investigating learning outcome of virtual geology field trips in comparison with actual trips.