Freya Muir’s Placement Report

In the summer of 2024, I had the pleasure of working with the coastal research team at the firm JBA Consulting, who specialise in environmental, engineering and risk management services. On a knowledge exchange placement, I provided the team with insights into my earlier PhD work on monitoring coastal geomorphic change using public satellite imagery, and in return was mentored through machine learning skills that would be applicable to my final PhD chapter on predicting short-term shoreline change.

I was allocated a Research & Development project that JBA Consulting had secured with the Orkney Islands Council, investigating the feasibility of using machine learning techniques to predict the closure of the iconic Churchill Barriers causeway. The four causeways connecting smaller islands in southern Orkney are susceptible to overwash from coastal storms, and when this looks likely, the authorities in the area close the causeways to traffic. My project looked at using the timings of past closures, as well as the wave and weather conditions leading up to each closure, to train a neural network so that it could learn the conditions required to send a closure signal. An early warning system like this could free up resources from in-person monitoring of the causeway, and could be implemented for other coastal structures vulnerable to storm events. In learning by doing, I also helped to advance this project enough that my mentor presented the results at an applied mathematics conference some months later.

The skills in machine learning for prediction I developed on this project were incredibly valuable for my final stage of PhD work, training a deep learning model to predict near-future shoreline change based on remotely sensed data. I also gained some important experience working in a professional consultancy/research setting outside of academia, which has been really insightful as I plan the next steps in my career. It was also great to widen my network of like-minded coastal scientists and engineers, with lovely colleagues who welcomed me warmly to the offices in Heriot-Watt campus and Glasgow city centre. I already miss the cycle commute along the Union Canal, and the lunches spent chatting in the sun by the campus loch!