🌊 Coastal Harmony

Sector: Construction / Land Development / Infrastructure Development / Environmental Engineering / Coastal Planning

🏗️ The Opportunity

A major developer is planning a luxury marina community — waterfront homes, private docks, and vibrant public spaces — nestled along a pristine coastal dune aquifer system. The location is ideal for high-end living, but also ecologically sensitive: wetlands, groundwater-dependent dune ecosystems, and shallow aquifers sustained by complex recharge dynamics.

The challenge isn’t whether to build — it’s how to build responsibly.

The developer is committed to low-impact development, but needs a way to ensure that “low impact” isn’t just a slogan — it must be scientifically defensible, regulator-reviewed, and ecologically sound.

💡 The MAGNET Approach

MAGNET4WATER is being used to guide the entire planning and design process — enabling development and ecosystems to coexist through data-driven design.

MAGNET supports a sophisticated, multiscale modeling architecture that spans from regional aquifer systems to nested, site-specific groundwater dynamics. This allows planners and engineers to simulate interactions across scales — from dune wetland recharge to trench dewatering — with precision and clarity.

The team is leveraging MAGNET’s ability to maximize all available data, including:

• Global big data layers: topography, land use, climate, hydrogeology, streams, lakes, and surface water networks
• Statewide water wells database: including well logs, screened intervals, and historical static water levels
• Locally collected site data: borehole logs, monitoring wells, and aquifer test results
• Aquifer testing and calibration: MAGNET’s groundwater models are calibrated directly to aquifer test monitoring data

MAGNET enables the team to evaluate the project from every angle:

• Big picture: regional aquifer dynamics, recharge zones, and ecosystem connectivity
• Local scale: site-specific flow paths, receptor exposure, and construction impacts
• Long-term impacts: potential hydrologic shifts and dune wetland degradation
• Short-term effects: transient dewatering and temporary flow disruption

This multiscale, data-rich approach transforms the planning process from speculative to simulation-driven — empowering smarter, faster, and more resilient decisions.

🔍 From Understanding to Innovation

Instead of spending months wrangling data, stitching together disconnected models, and manually recalibrating simulations, MAGNET allows the team to focus on what matters:

• Understanding the system
• Analyzing impacts
• Refining designs
• Exploring alternatives
• Aligning technical teams

🧱 Eliminating Long-Term Impact

MAGNET’s calibrated groundwater models indicate that the original marina design would likely cause long-term hydrologic disruption to nearby dune wetlands and aquifer systems.

The solution isn’t to abandon the project — it’s to engineer protection.

MAGNET’s nested modeling suggests that installing a clay liner beneath the marina basin could effectively eliminate long-term aquifer impacts by preventing vertical leakage and preserving natural flow gradients.

This recommendation is:

• Science-based
• Cost-effective
• Technically sound
• Delivered by the developer to EGLE for review and consideration

⏱️ Bringing Short-Term Impact Within Natural and Regulatory Limits

With long-term risks addressed, attention turns to transient construction impacts — especially those caused by dewatering during excavation.

MAGNET enables:

• Iterative testing and sensitivity analysis of dewatering schemes
• Scenario modeling to streamline dewatering duration and align impacts with seasonal fluctuations and regulatory thresholds

These refinements help ensure that short-term impacts remain predictable, reversible, and compliant — protecting nearby dune ecosystems while enabling efficient construction planning.

📐 Section-Based Dewatering — Precision by Design

To minimize impact further, MAGNET guides the team toward a section-based construction strategy:

• The marina basin is divided into three distinct sections
• Dewatering is planned one section at a time
• Each phase is modeled, visualized, and optimized using MAGNET’s real-time simulation tools

This approach:

• Reduces total dewatering volume
• Shortens exposure time for each zone
• Enables adaptive management based on live monitoring and feedback
• Preserves ecological integrity while maintaining construction efficiency

🧭 MAGNET Enables Transparent, Defensible, Science-Based Decision-Making

MAGNET doesn’t eliminate disagreement — especially in communities where development is emotionally charged or politically sensitive. But it does provide a foundation that is:

• Transparent — every assumption, input, and outcome is visible and traceable
• Defensible — grounded in calibrated simulation and regulatory logic
• Objective — driven by data, not intuition or politics
• Science-based — integrating real-time modeling, sensitivity analysis, and conservative assumptions

In a landscape where not every stakeholder will be objective — and some may oppose development regardless of safeguards — MAGNET empowers technical teams and regulators to act with clarity, confidence, and integrity.

🌿 The Current Status

• A comprehensive model-based assessment delivered to EGLE for review and consideration
• Long-term aquifer impacts addressed through clay liner design
• Short-term construction impacts modeled to remain within natural and regulatory limits
• A replicable framework for sustainable coastal development
• A foundation for informed permitting and stakeholder dialogue

🔭 The Bigger Picture

This project demonstrates a powerful truth:

Low-impact development does not mean no development.

With MAGNET, teams can:

• Design with data
• Build with confidence
• Protect what matters
• Accelerate permitting and collaboration
• Deliver value to both ecosystems and investors

MAGNET enables:

• Time spent on understanding the system, not wrangling data