Zhang’s appointment to lead the multi-institutional effort marks a significant milestone in her career. Although she has previously directed NSF-funded work, including a prestigious CAREER award and an EPSCoR fellowship, this is the first time she is leading a multi-institutional EPSCoR project under the Focused Collaborations Program. She has been convening with her team since last fall, laying the groundwork for research that will only now begin in earnest. Her background is unusually well suited to the task: a computational biologist by training, she combines expertise in computer science with deep knowledge of microbial diversity and molecular ecology. That interdisciplinary foundation, she has noted, gives her a distinctive perspective on problems that cut across traditional academic boundaries, precisely the kind of convergence thinking the project demands.

The stakes could hardly be higher for the regions involved. Louisiana’s river-dominated coast suffers the highest wetland loss rate in the United States, a crisis driven by sediment starvation, leveeing of the Mississippi River, canal dredging, and relative sea-level rise. Rhode Island, by contrast, faces a different but no less consequential set of pressures on its salt marshes and estuarine wetlands. Zhang, who lives in South Kingstown, emphasized what coastal wetlands mean to her home state. As the Ocean State, roughly 90 percent of Rhode Island’s residents live within a 20-minute drive of the shoreline, and coastal wetlands play a significant role in flood protection, habitat maintenance, and recreational services. The research, she said, could set important precedents for coastal wetland socio-ecological systems by providing new tools to better assess their value and generate new insights to support protection and restoration.

At the heart of EcoCARE is an ambitious methodological agenda. The team will develop innovative approaches in four interconnected areas: AI-enhanced modeling, wetland valuation, molecular biomonitoring, and restoration financing. According to Zhang, the project represents the first transdisciplinary team seeking the convergence of molecular biomonitoring, AI-enhanced geophysical modeling, and experimental economics under a single integrated research framework. That integration is more than a branding exercise. Molecular biomonitoring uses genetic signatures, such as DNA traces left by organisms in sediment and water, to assess the biological health of wetland ecosystems with a sensitivity that traditional surveys often cannot match. AI-enhanced geophysical modeling, meanwhile, can assimilate vast streams of environmental data to simulate how marshes respond to flooding, sediment delivery, and sea-level rise over decadal timescales.

The economic dimension of the project is equally central. Wetland valuation seeks to quantify the often-invisible services that marshes provide, from storm surge attenuation to carbon sequestration to nursery habitat for commercially important fish. By pairing those valuations with experimental economics, the researchers hope to inform restoration financing mechanisms, the practical question of who pays for wetland recovery and how the returns on such investments can be demonstrated to policymakers and taxpayers. Hui Zhou of URI’s Department of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics joins the URI team alongside Erin Peck of URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography, with additional collaborators at the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management and the Roger Williams University School of Law.

On the Louisiana side, Zhang will collaborate with Xiaochen Zhao and George Xue at LSU, whose work will tie together research currently happening miles apart in different settings. The expanded team plans to develop novel biomarkers for environmental monitoring and to work closely with coastal modeling experts, economists, and AI scientists to inform coastal wetland management in both states. The pairing is deliberate: by comparing wetland resilience in two geologically and administratively distinct coastal systems, the researchers hope to identify which restoration strategies are context-dependent and which generalize across environments. Louisiana’s deltaic marshes, built and maintained by riverine sediment, behave very differently from the glacially sculpted estuaries of southern New England, and lessons that transfer between them could carry weight far beyond the two states.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the collaboration is the contrast in governance styles the researchers have already observed. Zhang noted that Louisiana takes a top-down strategy to support statewide networks in wetland monitoring and priority assessment, while Rhode Island takes a bottom-up approach with active initiation from regional reserves, nonprofit organizations, and municipalities. The team is interested in understanding how these two strategies may influence the preparedness of coastal states in data collection, strengthening research, and promoting community engagement and translational science. That comparative lens could yield insights of national significance, since coastal managers across the country increasingly debate whether centralized monitoring programs or locally driven initiatives better position states to respond to accelerating environmental change.

In Rhode Island, the project will draw on the field expertise of Kenneth Raposa, a URI alum who earned degrees in 1993, 1997, and 2000 and now serves as research coordinator for the Narragansett Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve within the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management. Raposa brings more than two decades of field experience to the effort and will contribute wetland data collection, field monitoring, and vegetation assessment. His long-term familiarity with Narragansett Bay’s marsh systems provides the kind of ground-truthed observational record that computational models and molecular assays require for calibration and validation, anchoring the project’s high-tech methods in decades of on-the-ground ecological knowledge.

The EcoCARE team ultimately plans to share its results through a public web portal that will determine drivers and metrics for wetland management across both states. That commitment to open dissemination reflects a broader philosophy within the project: restoration science is only useful if it reaches the practitioners, planners, and communities who make decisions about coastal land. The portal is expected to serve as a shared analytical hub where stakeholders in Rhode Island and Louisiana can access the project’s models, valuation tools, and biomonitoring data, potentially establishing a template for how other coastal states coordinate restoration intelligence across political and ecological boundaries.

Beyond its scientific ambitions, the grant carries a substantial investment in people. The project will incorporate research and career development opportunities for students, postdocs, and early-career faculty, along with hands-on training for the wider community and workshops for trainees from colleges and universities in both Rhode Island and Louisiana. For Zhang, the excitement is both professional and personal. As a scientist and a resident of Rhode Island, she has said she is eager to contribute to the health and resilience of the state’s coastal wetlands. If EcoCARE succeeds, the collaboration stretching from Narragansett Bay to the Mississippi Delta may not only safeguard two states’ shorelines but also demonstrate how molecular biology, artificial intelligence, and economics can converge to keep the nation’s disappearing wetlands on the map.

Subject of Research: Coastal wetland restoration and resilience research in Rhode Island and Louisiana

Article Title: Bay to bayou: University of Rhode Island biologist to lead $4 million NSF grant to advance wetland restoration in Rhode Island and Louisiana

Article References: Bay to bayou: University of Rhode Island biologist to lead $4 million NSF grant to advance wetland restoration in Rhode Island and Louisiana. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: coastal wetlands, wetland restoration, National Science Foundation, University of Rhode Island, Louisiana State University, molecular biomonitoring, AI modeling, ecosystem valuation, EPSCoR, Narragansett Bay, Louisiana coast, climate resilience