Coastal monitoring and historical change : task 3 adaptable methodology to determine coastal change in England and Wales

An adaptable methodology for identifying coastal change, in physical, environmental, and social domains has been trialled for short sections of coast and recommendations are made as to the extension of the approaches for the English and Welsh coastline.
◼ A set of illustrative use cases for coastal change information have been used to frame the demonstration of the adaptable methodology for two sections of the coastline that include areas of rapid change (erosion and accretion) in rural and urban settings.
◼ The amount and rate of change has been established from the comparison of tidal lines (MHW and MLW) for historic Ordnance Survey (OS) Country Series maps through to the digital mapping of the OS Land Line and later OS Master Map data from 1890’s to the present day (Note: data for study sites are available via prototype platform website).
◼ Furthermore, changes in waterlines derived from Earth Observation satellite data have been used to identify the mean sea level using data from 38 years of available satellite coverage.
◼ More detailed assessment of cliff erosion is derived from processing of repeat LiDAR coverage and automated cliff top analysis, as well as deriving from other evidence where the same features can be identified. These approaches can be applied to other morphological features such as dunes and beach forms.
◼ The changes in coastline, whether erosion or accretion, have impacts on key receptors, including physical characteristics, habitats, built environment and infrastructure and defences at the coast. Change analysis within these parameters is more difficult to capture due to the lack of consistent and contemporary thematic data from which to capture change statistics. Recommendations to address these data gaps are recommended.
◼ Calculation or measures and summary indices of change are made to support data, information, and intelligence to address a range of use cases and to support strategic decision making at local, regional, and national levels. Further recommendations are made for the scaling up of these indices to support a national roll out of the adaptable methodology.
◼ A data platform has been trialled to provide visualisation of the data and contextual information as well as a series of summary analyses of the records that are meaningful to the different use cases identified. The platform is developed for the case study areas but approaches to scaling up to England and Wales are presented. These recommendations include a user requirements survey to help specify the needs in detail and specification of the non-functional requirements. It is recommended that this be integrated in some way with the existing extensive records of other coastal monitoring and change data within the National Network of Regional Coastal Monitoring Programmes and the Wales Coastal Monitoring Centre.