Jason Jamerson

CREATED, or Coastal Research and Engineering to Advance Test-beds for Ecosystem Design, is a $2.5 million collaboration with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Engineer Research and Development Center. The initial one-year effort connects LSU's capabilities in visualization, digital twins, geospatial modeling, and real-time simulation with ERDC's leadership in coastal engineering and ecosystem research.

The project focuses on physical test-beds along the Mississippi River and Louisiana's working coast. These environments allow researchers to study how sediment, water, vegetation, infrastructure, and engineered interventions interact under changing conditions. Our role is to create a digital framework through which those sites can be captured, organized, explored, and evaluated as connected systems rather than as isolated measurements or static maps.

Louisiana lives with the river, and decisions about flood control, sediment movement, navigation, coastal restoration, and ecosystem performance carry consequences for communities, industries, military assets, and national infrastructure. CREATED develops tools that help researchers and decision-makers understand those relationships before committing resources in the physical world.

The digital-twin environment brings together field capture, photogrammetry, LiDAR, geospatial information, engineering data, and scientific models inside an interactive real-time platform. Researchers can move through a test-bed spatially, compare existing and proposed conditions, review information in context, and communicate complex environmental processes through a shared visual system.

This work extends the scan-to-simulation methods our team developed for advanced manufacturing into the coastal domain. The same core principle applies: connect accurate spatial representation with operational and scientific data, then make that information usable through visualization. The result is a platform for examining relationships across scales, from individual site features to larger river and coastal systems.

CREATED is designed to support more than documentation. A mature test-bed twin can become an environment for scenario rehearsal, collaborative review, experiment planning, and long-term knowledge preservation. Researchers can evaluate alternative interventions, compare modeled outcomes, and identify where additional observation or physical testing will produce the greatest value.

The project also strengthens the connection between ecosystem design and infrastructure resilience. Natural and engineered systems increasingly have to be understood together, particularly where wetlands, sediment processes, flood protection, transportation, and military installations intersect. Digital twins provide a common environment in which engineers, scientists, planners, and stakeholders can examine those systems through the same spatial and data framework.

For LSU, CREATED expands an institutional model in which visualization functions as research infrastructure. It demonstrates how real-time engines, immersive interfaces, digital asset pipelines, and design methods can help organize complex scientific information and accelerate collaboration across disciplines. The project positions Louisiana's river and coastal environments as a national proving ground for new approaches to ecosystem engineering, resilient infrastructure, and simulation-supported decision-making.