Get to know N-EWN

A community of researchers, practitioners, and educators working together to advance the practice of natural infrastructure.

We work across four main branches

In order to help facilitate the widespread adoption of natural infrastructure practices across the United States, we’ve identified four main areas that need additional work:

Developing methods and standards

New tools, techniques and guidance are needed to effectively plan, design, construct and operate natural infrastructure at different scales

Assessing benefits and costs

Natural infrastructure provides communities with a broad array of economic, environmental and social benefits. Improved approaches are needed to evaluate, quantify and forecast these benefits to support planning and decision making

Monitoring performance and outcomes

Technically sound, efficient and applicable methods are needed to track natural infrastructure performance over time, develop the evidence base for future designs, ensure compliance with policy and inform project operations and adaptive management

Integrating people and policy

Providing infrastructure that supports human wellbeing and equitably meets the needs of diverse communities requires integration of human values, attitudes, beliefs, perceptions and policies with modern communication and collaboration practices


Combining a diversity of on-the-ground experience with interdisciplinary teams.

The N-EWN community is made up of over 30 partners from industry, academia and the non-profit sector.

What N-EWN’s been up to:

  • Learning from past projects: new paper published on a monitoring approach for improving natural infrastructure

    Learning from past projects: new paper published on a monitoring approach for improving natural infrastructure

    The N-EWN monitoring team recently published a paper in Science of the Total Environment, titled “A strategic monitoring approach for learning to improve natural infrastructure.” This paper gets at the important role that long term monitoring plays in helping us to improve designs for natural infrastructure projects, and ensure that they’re functioning as they should.…

  • N-EWN Partners win University of Georgia, Office of Research Awards

    N-EWN Partners win University of Georgia, Office of Research Awards

    This past week, the University of Georgia’s Office of Research announced the winners of the 43rd annual Research Awards. Sponsored by the University of Georgia Research Foundation, the awards recognize UGA faculty, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students for excellence and innovation in research, scholarly creativity, technology commercialization and entrepreneurship. N-EWN and IRIS had several faculty…

  • April 2022 Knowledge Series: Restoring the Nisqually River

    April 2022 Knowledge Series: Restoring the Nisqually River

    Daniel Krenz, USACE In 2009, the tidal waters of Puget Sound breached the Brown Farm Dike in efforts to restore the Nisqually Delta. This was the culmination of the largest tidal marsh restoration project in the Pacific Northwest. Daniel Krenz, regulatory section chief and project manager with the USACE Seattle District, discusses the history of…

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