KINGSTON, R.I. – May 13, 2025 – Starting this past winter, 19 aspiring landscape architects from the University of Rhode Island spent their senior capstone class researching and brain-storming to come up with landscape solutions to protect Mackerel Cove Beach and the surrounding area in Jamestown from sea-level rise and storm flooding.

Mackerel Cove Beach sits on a thin strip of land that connects the north and south sections of Jamestown, adjacent to Beavertail Road and directly across from Sheffield Cove. In the last several years, storms have damaged the system of dunes behind the beach, allowing seawater to wash up onto the road and deposit sand into Sheffield Cove.

“The dunes have been damaged by recent storms and the road has been closed several times,” said Hongbing Tang, a URI landscape architecture professor who led the capstone class. “This was a very exciting project for the class. We wanted to help Jamestown restore the dunes but we also wanted to look at the Sheffield Cove side to improve accessibility.”

On a recent Tuesday morning, the students – divided into six teams – presented their final designs to several Jamestown officials, fellow students, faculty, and guest reviewers at the Higgins Welcome Center on the Kingston Campus. The ambitious designs provided a range of solutions to address coastal resiliency in the area. They also offered ideas for everything from parking and transportation, reinforcing the dunes with plantings, providing an ADA accessible kayak launch area and boardwalks and scenic lookouts for bird watching at Sheffield Cove, which is home to a town park, recreation area and an Audubon Society wildlife refuge.

“We considered the area holistically and provided different options from the most natural approach to the more radical,” said Tang. “We also wanted to honor what the town people told us in a community workshop and in digital surveys.”

Maddie Ashenfelter, Lauren Vargas, Emma Curci and Evan Carlson focused on a design that honored what community members stressed in a public workshop – keeping the area “beachy” while providing ideas to deal with sea-level rise and flooding. Their plan would raise the road 5 to 6 feet above its existing height at the low land in the center of the connecting road, matching the proposed dune height recommended by a URI ocean engineering and civil engineering capstone class. The plan would enhance coastal resilience against flooding and allow for views of the beach. Switchback walkways would protect the dunes from beach-goers trekking across them to get down to the beach. On the Sheffield Cove side, their design included a kayak launch with a ramp for easier access along with overlooks for birdwatching.

Also adhering to residents’ desire to preserve the area’s natural beauty, Spencer Asofsky, Tim Purcel, and Stephanie Nordoff offered strategies that would address climate change while working with nature. They also proposed raising the road to the same dune height recommended by the engineering capstone class to protect from storm surge. In addition, they added several separate parabolic dunes to create a resilient dune system, along with dune walkover areas to improve ADA accessibility. To prevent beach erosion, they suggested an artificial reef of “reef balls” filled with bagged oyster shells that would make waves break earlier.

Perhaps the most radical approach was offered by Adam Giroux, Jay Giesen, and Sam Bowen, who proposed an elevated roadway that is 18 feet above sea level at its highest point. The design would also relocate parking to an area that would accommodate a bus stop and bike racks.

“Among the damages caused by many of the storms we looked at, one thing that really stoodout to us was the disconnection between [the north and south sections] of Jamestown,” said Bowen. “We thought that was the most important challenge here. And we took a bit of an ambitious approach.”

Jamestown Town Planner Lisa Bryer, who attended the presentation with Councilwoman Mary Meaher and Conservation Commission Chairwoman Anne Kuhn-Hines, said the students’ designs were thoughtful, creative, and whimsical–pushing the edges of what is possible. 

“The presentations were fabulous,” she said. “Multiple ideas stood out from the six different presentations. Each presentation had at least one nugget that was truly intriguing and worthy of further feasibility and potential implementation. I truly enjoyed the out of box thinking that the students provided as well as their ability to ground that thinking in reality of what would be acceptable to the community.”

The integrated senior project was supported by a grant from Rhode Island Sea Grant, and was a collaborative endeavor with the ocean engineering/civil engineering capstone class, who had proposed restoring and raising the dune system in their earlier study. 

The landscape architecture capstone class, LAR445, brought together the skills and knowledge Tang’s students have acquired in their four years at URI – putting them all in one, semester-long project. 

The students visited Jamestown twice during the semester to do a field study and site analysis, and heard from several town officials and residents about dangers facing the area from sea-level rise and tidal flooding and the need to protect Beavertail Road – the only access to the southern peninsula of the island. The class also gathered input from residents during a community workshop that attracted about 60 people, along with two online surveys that received comments from another 150 community members.  

Ashenfelter said the project was a good choice, allowing the students to immerse themselves into solving a real-life problem facing coastal communities. “The site itself is very simple but the beach is in trouble. If it stays the way it is, the beach and road will be in great danger,” she said. “The biggest part of the project was working through how to solve this problem – which is how future job projects may look.”

“As a landscape architecture student, this project gave me the opportunity to work on a large-scale coastal site that directly supports community engagement, fosters ecological health, and promotes a sustainable future for Jamestown,” added Asofsky. “Designing for such a dynamic environment challenged me to think critically about the long-term relationship between natural systems and human activity, as well as overall site functionality.”

Dealing with issues of coastal flooding and erosion haven’t come up in the students’ past design studios, making the Mackerel Cove project a unique opportunity, he said. “URI has done an excellent job of providing a diverse range of project experiences,” said Asofsky, who will pursue a master’s degree in coastal restoration and regenerative design at the University of Florida after graduation. “But this project has been especially valuable in preparing me for the next stage of my academic and professional journey.”

This summer, Tang and two students will prepare a final report of the students’ designs and send it to Jamestown officials. Bryer said the students’ ideas will be used as a basis for discussions between town and state officials as they work on solutions for sea-level rise affecting Mackerel Cove and the surrounding area.

“Jamestown truly thanks the students and the URI faculty, staff and participants for their time and consideration in studying a truly complex and vitally important issue on our island,” said Bryer.