A Personal Journey to Make NBS “Just Part of the Fabric” in the San Francisco District

Our guest is a scientist and innovator who brings new thinking and new applications of nature-based solutions (NBS) into her work every day. In Season 7, Episode 3, host Sarah Thorne is joined by cohost Jeff King, National Lead of the Engineering With Nature Program (EWN), and Julie Beagle, Environmental Planning Section Chief for the USACE San Francisco District. Julie joined USACE three years ago desiring to make the biggest impact possible. Jeff notes that, since then, Julie’s leadership on EWN has been absolutely outstanding and her passion for NBS to address a whole range of projects in the San Francisco Bay and throughout the district is inspiring. She’s moving the needle when it comes to advancing the practice of integrating NBS into project decision-making.

Julie began her career as a field scientist working in rivers all day, on a job that let her be outside doing science. As a geomorphologist, she studied how sediment and water shape the surface of the earth. In her early career, she focused on protecting salmonid species in northern California and assisted communities in restoring rivers and explored landscape management strategies to better protect and integrate habitats. Then she worked her way downstream into more engineered flood-control channels working on issues related to water quality and the interaction of land use and development. She notes that, “over the last 15 years, climate change became the driver. I became focused on how landscapes, people, species, and ecosystems are going to adapt to this changed reality.”

As Julie describes it, the whole watershed connects. What happens in the upper watershed influences what happens down in the floodplains, tidal marshes, down to the bay and the outer ocean. “It really helped me understand this entire landscape that we have modified and are now having to adapt for all the benefits that we need from our ecosystems and lands. We have to take a landscape approach, and that’s why Engineering With Nature really resonates for me.”

One of the projects that Julie worked on right before coming to USACE was the San Francisco Bay Shoreline Adaptation Atlas: Working with Nature to Plan for Sea Level Rise Using Operational Landscape Units. This publication helps communities identify different adaptation strategies that take advantage of natural processes. Julie has translated her experience to what she is doing for USACE today with the opportunity to work in different areas and across jurisdictions. “I’ve been focused on San Francisco Bay for a long time, but I’m really excited about all these other estuaries starting to think about this Adaptation Atlas–type approach. We can help them develop these same types of toolkits and then make that connection to the dredge material that the Army Corps produces across the entire West Coast.”

Jeff notes the importance of taking what is being demonstrated in the San Francisco District and replicating it across the country. “What Julie is doing in the San Francisco District has a lot of value. We want to capture that and share the learnings and experiences you’re having as an EWN Proving Ground with the rest of the Corps enterprise.” Leveraging her role as the EWN Lead in San Francisco District, Julie’s goal is “to make NBS just part of the fabric of the way we do business.” Jeff agrees, “I want this to be something that we use time and time again. NBS should become integrated into all our project decision-making. That is real culture change, and Julie’s leadership is a great example.”

For more information and resource links, please visit the EWN Podcast page on the EWN website at https://www.engineeringwithnature.org/

• Jeff King at LinkedIn
• Julie Beagle at LinkedIn