Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Thesis

Terms of Use

© 2026 Andrew Narain and Sabina Karabin. This work is freely available courtesy of the author. It may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. For all other uses, please contact the copyright holder.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Engineering Department

First Advisor

Daniel Adeleke

Abstract

This project aimed to determine the optimal erosion mitigation method for a specific site in the Crum Woods in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Inexpensive and bench-scale laboratory testing protocol was designed to measure the efficiency of retaining walls and of planting native grasses against a baseline, using rainfall simulations over a smaller version of the site slope. Erosion mitigation was measured through increased water infiltration through soil and decreased sediment runoff. It was found that the retaining wall increased infiltration of water into the soil from 2% (control) to 14.7% (retaining wall), but was outperformed by the plant infiltration of 27.5%. While the retaining wall had 10% less sediment in runoff than the control experiment, the plant condition had almost no solid sediment runoff. Meetings with the stakeholders for the site eventually led to permission to seed the site with the plant mix used in experimentation.

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