Mission Statement

The Shoreline Environmental Research Facility (SERF) endeavors to parallel its research strategies such that they align with those of national significance.  Specifically, SERF's programmatic research theme is similar to that proposed by the National Science Foundation (NSF), entitled “Collaborative Large-Scale Engineering Analysis Network for Environmental Research”, or CLEANER.  CLEANER is an initiative for collaborative research to support adaptive and sustainable environmental management, with the ultimate objective to facilitate a dynamic, linked (through cyberinfrastructure), research network for national and international coastal margins research and policy-making.

SERF stresses sensor development, deployment, and applications for data collection (both geo-referenced fine-scale spatial surveys and fixed-point time-series), information synthesis, and analysis for integrative predictive whole coastal ecosystem modeling based on in-situ continuous, periodic, and episodic monitoring.  To best accomplish this goal, the most promising pathways for incorporating existing and future coastal margins research into a cyberinfrastructure-based network that maximizes the effectiveness of collaboration among researchers must be identified.  This process will support proactive coastal management decision-making, as well as navigation, recreation, homeland security, and scientific advancements.

Ultimately, this must be capable of facilitating advanced environmental sensing, process modeling and analysis, system simulation, data visualization (across spatial and temporal domains), and the aggregation of multiple data sets, to be integrated, regularly updated, and made available, through a cyberinfrastructure, for collaborative use by the broader coastal margins research and policy development communities.  Results of these efforts will provide a major contribution to the development of a collaborative coastal margins research and management network, and, ultimately, to the sustainability of vital coastal environments.