Dirty Mangroves: Understanding Environmental Impacts on Urban Mangroves' Structure

Mangroves are vital natural infrastructure for coastal cities. They protect urban coastlines by mitigating erosion and flooding, and they provide a habitat for commercially important fish species. These properties depend on root systems that can sense and withstand mechanical loads, yet the stresses and strains experienced by mangrove roots under natural forcing remain understudied. We want to quantify these values and then study how environmental toxins impact those mechanisms. We treat roots as load-bearing organs and test their mechanical response to stress by pairing field work in urban mangrove forests in Miami with controlled laboratory trials. In the field, we mount strain gauges on live mangrove roots to record bending strains under wave conditions. These strain gauges monitor stress on mangroves over time. Insights from observations inform the design of idealized roots for wave-tank testing. While holding their root geometries approximately constant, we expose our constructed idealized roots to repeatable wave conditions, thereby isolating material and contamination effects. Primary metrics include bending-derived stress and strain rates with the ultimate goal of comparing how different root geometries interpret stress and strain. By linking pollution, root mechanics, and wave loading, our study aims to inform future approaches to urban mangrove survival and nature-based defenses.