Anheuser-Busch Coastal Research Center

The University of Virginia’s Anheuser-Busch Coastal Research Center (CRC) is a field station supporting research and education on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. The Coastal Research Center provides laboratory and dormitory facilities, logistics and technical support to visiting researchers and students from various institutions and agencies. The CRC provides research access to the coastal barrier system along Virginia’s Atlantic Coast. Tides, winds, and frequent storms cause sea level variations that affect over 70% of the coastal land area. These major and ongoing landscape changes provide a living laboratory for natural experiments along the coast. The station’s position in a regional hot spot for sea level rise places it at the epicenter of urgent conversations about how we can best use coastal scholarship to inform the future of coastal communities, making the CRC a nexus for burgeoning conversations about coastal resilience in the mid-Atlantic and beyond.

The Coastal Research Center provides lodging, laboratories, and captained research vessels to support research along the seaside of Virginia’s Eastern Shore. The facilities are open for use by researchers and students from institutions beyond UVA. The CRC provides an access point to the vast coastal wilderness of Eastern Virginia; permits and access are granted by landowners (details available through the CRC). Field station personnel maintain the site, conduct collaborative research with other scientists, collect data from meteorological stations, tide gauges, well transects and water level recorders. We specialize in supporting the study of long-term dynamics of the barrier islands, lagoons, marshes and watersheds on the coastal margin. The CRC is home to the multi-institutional Virginia Coast Reserve Long Term Ecological Research (VCR LTER) program, the most enduring initiative in the NSF-funded national LTER Network of field-defining research sites.