PERSPECTIVES 01: Tides of Change

The Environmental Modeling Lab (EMLab) is an applied research unit of the McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania, advancing the roles of sensing, simulation, and modeling within the discipline of landscape architecture. The lab specializes in the analysis, simulation, and visualization of coastal landscapes by use of remote sensing, UAV surveys, and ground-truthing fieldwork. Their work bridges the gap between ecological engineering and design fields through the creation of novel environmental datasets, experimental models (digital and physical), and with visual interpretations of complex data. By situating its research at the McHarg Center, the EMLab is able to experiment with novel methodology, and partner with both academic and private-sector collaborators. This intellectual freedom allows the Lab to develop and advance new strategies for protecting and adapting coastlines to the challenges of climate change.

The EMLab’s research touches coastlines from the Great Lakes to the Galápagos, New Jersey to the Gulf Coast. In 2025 the team received a national ASLA Honor Award in Research and a World Landscape Architecture (WLA) award for its modeling and monitoring project “About Time: Adaptive Management for Coastal Salt Marshes,” and is continuing work in collaboration with the University of Auburn, University of Virginia and the US Army Corps of Engineers. More information on the EMLab’s current projects can be found here.

Co-founders Sean Burkholder, Karen M’Closkey, and Keith VanDerSys sat down with EMLab Research Assistants Clarasophia Gust and Mariya Lupandina to discuss the land-water divide in data and technology, the importance of landscape architects’ involvement in creating environmental data, and how an applied research lab within academia can push the landscape discipline to think differently.

Clarasophia Gust  Could you please introduce the EMLab, the range of projects, and the subject matter that the lab deals with?

Sean Burkholder  The lab focuses on modeling and monitoring natural processes, particularly processes that we don't normally see or experience, or ones that happen at scales that we don't easily understand. I like to think that the “M” in EMLab stands for both modeling and monitoring. For example, in the Healthy Port Futures project, we weren’t doing a lot of environmental modeling but there's a fair amount of monitoring. Monitoring is as important as modeling.

Karen M’Closkey  Our work is focused on the littoral zone, specifically on projects within the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic. We’re also interested in the representational aspects of how these environments are understood; that is, we are interested in how models and images enable or preclude specific knowledge about the landscape.

Mariya Lupandina  Why should landscape architects be doing monitoring and modeling work?

M’Closkey  Fieldwork has always been part of the landscape architecture discipline. Everyone used to know how to survey the old-fashioned way. Our monitoring and modeling practice is an extension of this tradition, but the tools we have access to today enable surveying in areas that are inaccessible using only ground-surveying methods.

When landscape architects start with maps—when I was in grad school, we went to the map library, now it’s mostly GIS data—we start with pre-given and static representations of the real world. This information was gathered for some purpose, often not our intended purpose, and we’re using it to build the base—the ground—of a project. So, to be able to step back further to create that ground, that data, offers other ways of understanding the landscape. Also, when you physically go to a place, you get different information than if you're viewing it from above via satellite image or through someone else's map. It is important to critically examine the media and methods used by landscape architects to do our work.

Burkholder  With the modeling and monitoring skillset we can collect data that are relevant to the kind of work we need to do or want to do. Landscape architects spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to take data that were collected for one thing and use it for something else. We end up running into lots of problems and limitations. Sometimes it's too large and coarse, sometimes it's detailed to the degree that makes it cumbersome to use, and sometimes it's honestly just wrong. When you have a particular scale or task and can effectively collect the data necessary to answer questions related to that scale or task, and answer them well, you gain the opportunity to learn about that environment. This is especially important in the littoral zone, where we are losing data every day due to sea level rise and habitat conversion, among other impacts.

If landscape architects don’t play an active role in making environmental data, then these data—which form the foundation for our designs and our understanding of what landscapes are at highest risk—will no longer be there.

Keith  VanDerSys  My answer changes day-to-day. Du jour, I'm going to start with this: you never know how important something is and how much you take it for granted, until it's taken away. In the 1970s—predicated on the realization that the environment was rapidly degrading, and the desire to understand what was happening from a site scale to a global systems scale—the federal government initiated and funded the development of Earth observation technologies to facilitate environmental data collection. The current federal administration aims to suppress this environmental data and eliminate the government’s capacity to collect and further innovate within this area. The change in administration put into sharp focus the absolute urgency for us to be out collecting data about these rapidly changing landscapes. 

Gust  What, then, does landscape architecture bring to that larger field of modeling and monitoring?

Burkholder  I’ll highlight that the vast majority of this world is not designed by landscape architects. As a lab, we're interested in coastlines, and that world is largely designed by engineers. The only way we will ever have a real effect on our coastal environments is by productively working with people who have well-established relationships there. Our modeling and monitoring capability allows us to run design research and landscape exploration through tools that are consistently used by the engineering disciplines. Monitoring and modeling techniques work as a kind of translation device.

We are not going to convince a coastal ecologist, geomorphologist, or coastal engineer to start caring about Olmsted or anyone else. Rather, my interest has always been in how we can productively integrate ourselves into those conversations in ways that allow our thinking as landscape designers to be beneficial.

In many cases, it's a matter of being able to talk about time scales that the typical coastal management person doesn't normally think about. 

The ability to work at longer timescales has allowed us to do certain kinds of work with the Army Corps of Engineers. The Army Corps has planning horizons that are federally mandated, and they're not allowed to exceed them, but within the EMLAB, we can think about whatever time scales are important to the specific landscape and project, not be limited to when federal funding is available.

VanDerSys  There's also a distinction between data and information. Landscape architects can translate data into information that provides a coherent narrative or framework for understanding. The ability to sway audiences through visual and verbal means is an important capacity that we have. The data alone are not going to move people.

Lupandina  You’ve also often talked about the technological limitations of working in the interstitial space between wet and dry and the need to develop techniques to work in these variable landscapes – could you talk to this?

VanDerSys  Before forming the EMLab, there was an illuminating moment when I was building the base data for an environmental simulation model of an intertidal zone. We kept bumping up against this issue where there were two different datasets: one for everything that is subaquatic and one for everything above the so-called water line.

But then there is an interstitial zone where no data exists because the two technological systems don’t interface. It’s a zone that is sort of wet, or wet sometimes and dry other times – salt marshes, mudflats, bogs, and other types of intermittently wet lands. Satellite-collected data do not capture or describe these non-binary conditions very well, yet these landscapes are among the most ecologically productive and at risk. By creating this data, we can provide a documented baseline to facilitate future assessments about landscape change and allow for predictive modeling.

Burkholder  It's still not an easy zone to measure, whether you're in freshwater or saltwater.

VanDerSys  It’s still not, no.

Gust  What roles do you each take on in the Lab’s operation?

VanDerSys  I do much of the field collection, data processing, and monitoring that goes with the restoration of salt marsh wetlands.

M’Closkey  I'm very much interested in the technologies we use to understand landscapes and environments. So, other than occasional field surveying, my role is to put EMLab’s work in conversation with media studies, technology studies, history of science, etc., not only in terms of what those disciplines bring to landscape architecture, but also what we offer to those fields. It's reciprocal. I’d say I’m responsible for most of the writing.

Burkholder  I'm really excited about fieldwork, in a broad sense that extends beyond quantifiable data. I find something magical in connecting to the landscape and sussing out what makes it interesting as an experiential product. It’s a very different take than the other two, but this perspective is useful in terms of how we all come at things a little bit differently.

VanDerSys  Our different strengths and interests are a benefit. We have very little repetition and redundancy. It also helps parse out the work – we are each very comfortable and happy in our roles, which makes for a smooth collaboration.

Gust  So how did the EMLab officially form?

Burkholder  A lot of it was initiated with the idea that The McHarg Center was interested in identifying areas of overlap across faculty research. At the time, Keith and Karen were doing drone surveying and monitoring work in the Galápagos and I was modeling sediment flows for a project called Healthy Port Futures. There was a pretty clear alignment of interests and it made sense for us to work together.

M’Closkey  Formally establishing the EMLab also helped us stabilize the funding necessary for our work. By 2020, the McHarg Center’s support, in addition to Sean's grant from Healthy Port Futures, helped us hire research assistants and add additional projects.

VanDerSys  At that time, Sean and I were also co-teaching a technology seminar on remote sensing and salt marsh simulation. Sean was a member of the Seven Mile Island Innovation Lab (SMIIL), so we used the SMIIL site as the exploratory location for the seminar. As part of working on the SMIIL site, we were doing fieldwork with The Wetlands Institute (TWI) in Stone Harbor, NJ. They manage 6000 acres of protected coastal ecosystems. During this work, we were able to show a level of competency and ability that they found useful. They’d been working on their properties for 50 years and could see how the landscape was changing, but they didn't have the capacity to quantify those changes. This relationship grew into UAV (drone) surveying work and, subsequently, a series of large grants where we partnered with TWI and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP).

Lupandina  How have these partnerships influenced your ideas of the role landscape architects should play in shaping policy or influencing decision-making?

VanDerSys  Asked by the dual-degree in planning, of course! I think you are the generation that will answer that for us.

M’Closkey  There are problems with how certain things are regulated, like floodplains. We build according to established elevations and datums. These standards, and how they came to be, are taken for granted in day-to-day practice. They have to be, so that projects can be built. However, the regulations are often very problematic; they need to change, but how? Maybe on a project-based level, building relationships is where you can have the most effect. Some clients may be interested and have the funding to work differently. Alternatively, we could focus on the institutions that create those datums, making sure landscape architects are aware of the shortcomings.

One strategy is to find niches where there are fewer practical constraints, where you can create space for experimentation. For example, there are two ways the Army Corps of Engineers projects are funded: Operations and Planning. There's so much more flexibility in the Operations Division where they're not working to the same constraints, budgets, and timeframes, so finding work in that area has been very fruitful.

Lupandina  What are the two ways Army Corps projects are funded? What have you learned from that?

Burkholder  The Operations Division just does things. They use their Continuing Authorities Program (CAP) for essential management and maintenance work. If you know you have to do something every year, you just go and do it without putting it through a long approval process or performing environmental impact assessments for NEPA. The Planning Division manages big capital projects. Approval of this work takes forever because it goes through a lot of checks and balances. The big capital projects have to be congressionally approved and have funding appropriated. The difference between the two divisions is the ability to have agility and flexibility in how things get done. The natural world around us, the world we’re messing up, is changing a lot faster than we're able to keep up with politically and policy-wise. In most cases, those policies keep us from doing anything.

One option is to do projects that are pushing the bounds in order to make a case for why methods should change. For example, on the Port Bay project as part of Healthy Port Futures, we advocated for passive dredge management whereby a bell-shaped sediment pile would feed the eroded nearshore using wave energy, instead of relying on mechanical equipment to move it there. To realize the project, we had to demonstrate to the State of New York that the material would move where we thought. We placed the material, monitored it, and showed that it was moving as we predicted.

Visualizing this information allowed the community to buy into the idea and ultimately encouraged the state to allow the project to be permitted on a regular basis. That's a small policy change that only applies to the permits for one county, but it’s an example of where showing led to change. But it involved navigating so much red tape that you could make the argument that it's not worth doing. It takes a lot of time to get things changed.

M’Closkey  The benefit of academia is that it allows space for hypothetical projects like the Dredge Collaborative. That was not a client, but through being part of that group, you established your expertise, which helped the Healthy Port Futures work. 

It's important that we're not constrained by current policies, borders, or governments. Our ability to visualize alternatives might provide people with a vision of how things could be different and suggest ways to enact those changes.

Gust  What's been most surprising to you in the research, perhaps an unexpected result or a surprising relationship with partners?

VanDerSys  It's not a profound answer, but the biggest surprise is how much I enjoy fieldwork. Being in the field, collecting data, and immersing myself in the interface between the natural and the technological world have made me acutely aware of the environment. I have to modulate my activities relative to the environment in a way that I never had to do in a studio or in the laboratory, which has had a profound influence on how I think about technological observation systems.

M’Closkey  The shift in the type of projects we are doing is not something I would have predicted. The work we were doing from 2008 to 2016 was all based on tools and techniques that were just emerging. Believe it or not, Grasshopper wasn't a thing 15 years ago. At the time, we were interested in patterns, aesthetics, and how people understand the temporal aspects of the environment through designed landscapes. Our work was focused on things that you would say are visible and experiential.

In 2017 we were invited to do a studio in the Galápagos Islands and we received an invitation to participate in the Resilient by Design competition in the Bay Area. Over two years, the scope and scale of our work greatly expanded. The work is still about tools and aesthetics, but it’s no longer limited to physical design; it is more about how designers understand landscapes through the conventional but abstract representations of data and Earth observation technologies. We had already been working on this topic through a symposium (Simulating Natures, 2015), writing, and editing, but did not have the chance to put it into practice on real projects until a few years later.

VanDerSys  It has also been surprising to me how quickly the EMLab has matured. We parlayed those existing collaborations and connections into a growing portfolio of really exciting work—it’s really stimulating to be participating in the emerging science and practices of salt marsh restoration. We had no idea we would be doing this type of work, and seeing it get built. We're able to watch how it performs and evolves. That's been totally surprising for me.

Burkholder  I agree, it has been great. It's just about finding the right relationships and the right people, and then demonstrating technical competency to say, “We can develop really detailed information that can inform decisions that you're making.” Then, finding the right people who are interested in that information and have connections to fund it. Once you form those relationships, you can just be good at what you're good at.

VanDerSys  These relationships include the many wonderful RAs we’ve had. The level of input and influence that you’ve all provided, helping to build up the knowledge base of the EMLab, has been completely rewarding.

M’Closkey  Yes – we could not do it without you. 

This interview was conducted for Perspectives 01 and has been edited and condensed for clarity.