National screening tools, such as CEJST and the U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index, systematically mask the vulnerability of underrepresented communities because census-tract aggregation allows adjacent resort wealth to overwrite local socio-economic burdens. This statistical erasure necessitates a transdisciplinary resilience assessment for American Beach which is a historic African American coastal haven founded in 1935 that faces acute ecological and displacement pressures.

What are the quantifiable, community-based metrics that represent cultural landscape resilience, and how can this be approached via a relational values lens?

1. Identify gaps in how resilience is defined and measured for cultural landscapes in existing resilience frameworks.

2. Determine the local community’s contexts and meanings associated with the cultural relational values of their cultural landscapes and the resilience thereof using community-based ethnographic and participatory cultural mapping approaches.

3. Develop composite metrics merging qualitative and quantitative data obtained from ethnographic data sets as well as environmental climate data.

To date ethnographic fieldwork was conducted between June 2024 and September 2025, identifying 111 significant biocultural sites, revealing that historical legacy relational values dominate and development is the primary threat. Following validation roundtables in March and July 2026, we are currently working with Friends of American Beach to operationalize these community driven spatial metrics into proactive protection of American Beach's biocultural diversity.