Engineering
AEI’s Engineering Team designs for success, considering the permitting needs and monitoring requirements during the design phase. Our interdisciplinary team plans, designs, and supervises the construction of projects that integrate existing ecological functions to deliver multiple ecosystem services, using innovative technologies to address flooding, water quality, and ecosystem alterations, strengthening infrastructure, sustaining mission readiness objectives, and restoring our aquatic ecosystems and navigable waterways. AEI can support the entire life cycle of an engineering project, from data collection, to permitting, to construction and evaluation with expertise focused on coastal, ecological, and stormwater engineering.
Comprehensive coastal engineering services focus on enhancing shoreline resiliency and protecting critical coastal resources and infrastructure. AEI has experience planning, designing, permitting, and constructing living shorelines, environmental and navigational dredging, and beach and dune restoration projects. Additionally, our modeling team has extensive coastal modeling expertise including sand transport modeling, numerical models, and Environmental Fluid Dynamics Code/Hydrodynamic and Eutrophication Three-Dimensional Model (EFDC/HEM3D). By integrating engineering, modeling, environmental science, regulatory expertise, and community planning, AEI can help you attain long-term community resiliency goals.
AEI’s ecological engineers design and build with nature in mind, constructing landscape and water features that augment, reproduce, or replace ecosystem services. From uplands to streams to wetlands, ecological restoration requires an approach that integrates hydraulic performance, sediment dynamics, and ecological function within a highly modified system. To accomplish this, AEI works closely with clients and stakeholders to understand needs and analyzes existing data to assess ecosystem function. Thereafter, the ecological engineers and scientists develop a plan to advance ecosystem restoration, including data collection, monitoring, and permitting needs as well as community engagement and policy changes. Plans are developed with constructability in mind, including site access, staging, material selection, and sequencing. During construction, AEI provides targeted site visits to verify that grading, stabilization features, and vegetation are installed in accordance with design requirements, including appropriate elevations and planting zones. After construction, AEI’s ecological team implements permit-required monitoring, including novel monitoring approaches to justify associated nutrient load reductions for BMAP reporting if needed.
Stormwater engineering is one of AEI’s specialties because we integrate science and engineering to design and evaluate projects that address multiple ecosystem services, advance community resiliency, and maintain regulatory compliance. Our innovative stormwater team investigates novel BMP applications to design projects that address multiple stormwater challenges, integrate novel Low Impact Development practices, and demonstrate methods to quantify and justify the associated pollutant load reductions. In many cases, feasibility assessments, including Engineering Valuations, are provided to compare and contrast various BMP options based on their overall costs and benefits. Our approach combines engineering judgment, site-specific data, and field performance monitoring to support practical BMP and restoration designs, including traditional systems, innovative BMPs, treatment trains, living shorelines, and nature-based infrastructure.
