Zuzanna Swirad

Postdoctoral Scholar

Research Interests

Rock Coasts
Cliff Erosion
Landslides
GIS & Remote Sensing
Cosmogenic Exposure Dating

Zuzanna Swirad's postdoctoral research is focused on the ‘Statewide assessment of California coastal cliff erosion and retreat’ project sponsored by the California Ocean Protection Council. She is using airborne LiDAR data to determine decadal-scale coastal erosion rates in California, identify erosion hotspots and to detect local regional trends. She is developing methods to automatically map coastal cliffs, detect topographic change, and analyze the relationships between cliff erosion, composition, coastal setting, armoring and environmental factors (waves, rainfall). More broadly, Swirad is interested in the interplay between marine forces and rock resistance in driving coastal change, and in combining field observations and remotely sensed data with numerical modeling to gain insight into landscape evolution for a range of spatio-temporal scales.