Coastal ecosystems are of the first to be effected by climate change and associated disturbances including, increased sea-level rise and storm activity as well as fluctuations in temperature, precipitation, and fire regime. Extreme events like hurricanes and drought can be devastating to human populations and can cause dramatic change in ecosystem function. Although there has been a lot of research investigating physical processes that shape coastal ecosystems, there remains a knowledge gap regarding the role of vegetation in feedbacks with physical processes leading to ecosystem resilience or lack there of. For example, dune grasses play the role of ecosystem engineers, building dunes that dissipate or resist high energy waves depending on growth strategy. Furthermore, colonization of new vegetation after an extreme disturbance event can modify ecosystems by making them less resilient to future disturbance events. The goal of this session is to bring together ecologists that work with coastal vegetation, from dunes to marshes, to discuss the role of regional vegetation in driving ecosystem response and resilience to extreme disturbance events. By bringing together coastal ecologists from different regions we can broaden our perspective of studies in coastal resilience that focuses on vegetation dynamics. As climate change unfolds, extreme disturbance events are expected to increase in various forms, including increased frequency and intensity of storms, drought, and fire. These extreme disturbance events can result in changes in species composition, functional trait diversity, and ecosystem function. With these changes come modifications to biotic and abiotic interactions between plants and their environment, which can be long lasting. Taken together, extreme disturbance events, leading to ecosystem modification, make it more critical than ever to understand how coastlines will respond to disturbance because they are vulnerable to global climate change and serve as host to a high concentration of the human population. The speakers in this session are diverse in career stage and they work in coastal regions ranging from east coast to west coast. Some contributors have dedicated their career to enhance the understanding of coastal ecology and others are young career ecologists working to continue the advancement of coastal ecology through novel methods and techniques. By presenting the latest original research in coastal ecology, we can begin to evaluate how our understanding of coastal ecosystems is progressing and how each of us can contribute to that progression.