A ten-member team of faculty at the Graduate School of Design is beginning a concentrated study of the South Shore of Massachusetts Bay after receiving a half-million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation.

The two-year project will weigh questions such as conservation of natural resources versus urban growth and the impact of major highway and industrial construction on the growth of suburban communities.

Carl F. Steinitz, associate professor of Landscape Architecture, who directs the group, said yesterday that the project is essentially a study of research methods rather than an action program for the South Shore area. "We are using the South Shore region because it is typical of suburban growth at a metropolitan fringe," he said.

The area to be studied has not yet been delineated but will probably include the North and South River watershed areas. The research team has been working in the South Shore area for over three years, and they say they have accumulated data relevant to the current project.

The region will be divided into 2 1/2-acre grids for research purposes. The team members will then collect a diversity of information about the soil, wildlife, current land use and exact location of each grid and feed it into a computer. After the designers have planned changes in the region, the computer will simulate the effects of these alterations allowing the team to see regional patterns.