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Part of UGA’s division, Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant provides coastal communities with education and assistance to foster responsible use of Georgia’s coastal resources. The program is a partnership between UGA and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) , a national network of 34 Sea Grant programs in coastal and Great Lakes states and territories.

Covi works with coastal military installations and surrounding communities, connecting them to programs and projects that help them thrive in the face of rising sea levels and increased flooding risks due to climate change. She focuses on infrastructure and ecosystems that affect military missions and communities, which often include salt marshes.

“I was always interested in the natural environment and ecosystems,” Covi said. “Growing up in Baltimore, there would be these huge ravines with tall trees that I spent hours exploring.”

Covi attended UGA in the late 1980s to pursue a master’s degree in zoology. As a graduate student, she travelled to Sapelo Island (home to the ) to study food chains. There, she discovered her love for Georgia’s salt marshes.

“Georgia is a great place to study salt marshes. They’re so much bigger here than the Chesapeake Bay —I couldn’t believe it when I first saw them,” Covi said. “There’s so much going on in these environments where fresh water meets salt water and the land is meeting the sea, creating this nutrient-rich mud for plants and animals to thrive in.”

She was working on her Ph.D. in coastal resources management at East Carolina University when Covi came across a calling that would occupy the rest of her career: communicating climate and environmental issues to the public.

“At the time, I resisted focusing on climate change, but it became increasingly clear that my line of work was pivoting to that issue,” Covi said. “Sea level rise just kept coming up as an emerging issue in North Carolina, and people at the coast did not understand or want to plan for it.”

Her position with DoD allowed her to address this gap in public understanding while providing solutions to coastal communities—solutions that become more necessary with every centimeter the water gains on the land.

“The people in DoD are very interested in working on nature-based solutions to climate adaptation and supporting natural resources,” Covi said. “With that, we’re looking at how we can restore salt marshes in coastal communities.”

Salt marshes play a vital role in coastal resiliency and sustainability. Covi described them as the “kidneys of the earth” that serve multiple purposes, including purifying water and providing nursery grounds for marine life. The marshes also serve as a buffer when large storms come through.

“If you live on the other side of the marsh and you’re hit by a storm surge, the salt marsh actually slows all of that water down,” Covi said.

Some of the most common ways Covi said that project partners restore salt marshes is by using a technique called living shorelines. As opposed to hard structures like seawalls, living shorelines use vegetation and other natural resources to serve as barriers against shoreline erosion and flooding.

Covi works closely with the DoD’s (REPI) program to preserve natural resources in military installations and communities. In addition, she collaborates with , a regional organization that covers much of the Southeast from North Carolina to Mississippi.

“That makes me different from a lot of the people in Sea Grant,” Covi said. “I work all over the Southeast and other parts of the country in a federal partnership with DoD.”

At UGA, Covi often works with the , the , and the for nature-based infrastructure solutions to the issues she encounters in the various military communities.

“I sometimes bring projects to the units to work on. For example, I connected some folks from the UGA Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems in the College of Engineering with a natural resources manager at Fort Stewart to look at a salt marsh changing due to a tide gate  designed to protect a railroad bridge. An engineering student is now working on a nature-based alternative. ,” Covi said.

Although she enjoys opportunities to work with academic faculty, Covi loves working hands-on with communities and solving problems that have an immediate impact.

“I find that working with colleagues and communities fit my personality better and allow me to make that impact I want. In fact, a lot of what I do is connecting people and groups.”

Ultimately, as the coastal resiliency liaison, Covi’s goal is to provide communities with sustainable and environmentally friendly solutions so that their ecosystems can flourish and their infrastructures can withstand what the Atlantic throws at them.

“With the climate continuing to change and create these big storms, we’re going to see disruptions, not only in the quality of life on these coastal military installations, but also how it affects their training,” she said. “By preserving the existing ecosystems, we reduce the climate impacts.”