The Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and the University of Georgia (UGA) are longtime heated rivals on the football field, dating back to 1893, with their rivalry earning the nickname “Clean, Old Fashioned Hate.” But the two academic powerhouses in the state are teaming up for something bigger than football: protecting Georgia’s coasts.

The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) awarded researchers from both universities a $1 million grant through the National Coastal Resilience Fund to restore coastal wetlands in Georgia, according to a Georgia Tech press release.

Specific areas of work from this grant will include flood-prone areas of Georgia, such as 100 acres near the Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, the largest of the targeted sites, Cumberland Island National Seashore, Camden County and the City of St. Marys.

According to the UGA Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant, Georgia has the second largest amount of salt marshes in the United States, behind only South Carolina, and approximately one-third of all the salt marshes on the East Coast.

The UGA team, consisting of Clark Alexander, Matt Bilskie, and Brian Bledsoe, previously won an NFWF grant in 2024 for nearly $1 million for a project centered on marsh and shoreline resilience in the area, according to a UGA press release. Likewise, Joel Kostka, the principal investigator on the grant from Georgia Tech on this grant, previously worked with a number of collaborators on a $2.6 million NFWF-funded project to “restore degraded salt marshes in historic Charleston,” according to a Georgia Tech press release.

The team of university researchers is also joined by Ashby Worley of the nonprofit Nature Conservancy and Nolan Williams of Robinson Design Engineers.

“We couldn’t do what we do without support from the federal government and private foundations to perform research that’s important to Georgia, that serves all Georgians,” Kostka said.

The project was the only project in Georgia to receive funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation in 2025. It is slated to be a three-year project that will officially start on June 1, 2026.

A nature-based solution

The work has a circularity component to it that makes it a nature-based solution.

“What we do in a nutshell is try to understand how ecosystems work, what services they provide for people, how these ecosystems, in this case coastal wetlands, respond to disturbances such as severe storms and sea level rise linked to climate change, and we can naturally boost the resilience of these ecosystems,” Kostka said, adding: “And how do we restore these systems when they become degraded?”

Kostka explained that for years, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has looked to use its dredged materials as much as possible for ecosystem restoration.

Dredging is the removal of sediment and other materials from the bottom of a water body, typically to deepen canals and make ship passage easier. That removed dredged material, without a purpose after removal, becomes waste. In the latter half of the 20th century, however, more research into using the material in beneficial ways emerged.

One of those ways is the salt marsh restorations that Kostka and his team have been working on. Salt marshes are accumulations of sediment downstream of rivers where plants can take root and grow. Because dredged material is largely natural sediment, the material can be used to increase the elevation of these salt marshes.

Why do teams need to artificially inflate these marshes, though? The common culprit of sea level rise.

“The long-term success of these ecosystems is going to be dependent on their ability to keep up with sea level rise,” Kostka said. “They have to grow at the same rate that sea levels are rising, or they’ll drown. Marshes live in a sweet spot between tides, so the grasses have to live in that sweet spot, and by adding that sediment and recycling those sediment materials, we’re giving them a boost to be able to survive sea level rise.”

The inter-university effort between the two rival schools exemplifies how critical collaboration is when working on grand projects. Georgia Tech and UGA are among the top three largest research institutions in the state.

“This work that we do in developing nature-based solutions to boost resilience and restore degraded wetlands could not be done without collaboration, without partnerships,” Kostka said.

Beyond research collaborations, Kostka emphasized that this sort of project requires collaboration with local stakeholders to truly be effective.

“This work must be stakeholder-driven; we must go out and talk to all of those people that are affected by these important, real-world problems, such as environmental change, land use change, to develop changes that are going to help,” Kostka said. “This work that we’re doing on the Georgia coast builds on resilience plans, collaborations and partnerships that we’ve been working on for years near the Georgia coast.”

Funding for climate-related work has become less abundant as the current administration has pulled back on climate-related funding and reduced federal agency staffing in broader efforts to reimagine federal priorities, making this grant all the more critical to the work at hand.

“We feel very fortunate to be funded to continue to do this very important work that we have been doing,” Kostka said. “The disruptions to science go beyond the funding that we receive, especially from the federal government, but also the fact that there have been so many changes to staff within all of the federal agencies that disperse funds.”

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