Anamaria Bukvic
- Department of Geography
Synopsis:
- Coastal hazards, adaptation, and resilience
- Population displacement and relocation
- Impacts of natural hazards and disasters on older adults
- Flood risk management, vulnerability assessment, and scenario planning
Description:
Dr. Bukvic’s research is focused on coastal resilience, vulnerability, security, population displacement, and mobility. She is further interested in whether relocation can serve as a viable adaptation strategy to sea level rise in coastal communities and what opportunities could emerge from this process. She uses mixed-methods to study complex emerging issues in coastal urban and rural settings related to flooding, such as geospatial analysis, surveys, and interviews. Her early projects evaluate the use of relocation rhetoric in climate change adaptation documents and introduce new decision-support tools to inform relocation planning (e.g., the Coastal Relocation Leaf, the Relocation Suitability Index (RSI), and the Relocation Potential Assessment for Coastal Communities).
More recently, Dr. Bukvic conducted two post-hurricane Sandy household surveys on willingness to consider relocation in disaster-affected communities and interviews with stakeholders in Hampton Roads, Virginia, and on the Eastern Shore in Maryland on barriers and opportunities for adaptation. Her current projects are focused on older population living in flood-prone coastal areas, coastal vulnerability mapping, and impacts of flood-induced relocation on local jurisdictions and their resilience.
Dr. Bukvic’s current projects are funded by the National Science Foundation and the State of Virginia to study impacts of chronic and episodic coastal flooding on coping capacity, resilience, and vulnerability in coastal communities. She is also a Fellow of the NSF-funded Early Career Innovators Program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and serves as a co-lead of the Coastal@VT interdisciplinary research initiative at Virginia Tech.