Coastal Changes and Impacts

A satellite system designed to image land is helping fill in data gaps of underwater topography near shorelines.

Coastline erosion can change your favorite beach. But it can also affect highways and buildings. Landsat, along with high-resolution data, can be used to model the past and predict the future of changes caused by sea level rise and coastal erosion.

The USGS is collaborating with researchers from other agencies, academia, and industry to predict coastal impacts from hurricanes. The results from this study will better inform coastal morphological change models, which will lead to improved hurricane impact projections.

High-resolution light detection and ranging (lidar) elevation data were acquired along the north coast of Alaska between 2009 and 2012. The lidar acquisition, from Icy Cape, Alaska to the United States/Canadian border, comprised approximately 11,000 km 2 . The airborne lidar data were acquired in support of the U.S. Geological Survey Coastal and Marine Geology Program. The purpose of this lidar...

To support the modeling of the Colorado River water storage area capacity tables by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Utah Water Science Center, the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center created a 3D high-resolution topobathymetric digital elevation model (TBDEM) for Lake Powell. Located in south-central Utah and north-central Arizona, the second largest man-made reservoir in...

Each of the polygons in the topographic change inventory has numerous attributes associated with it. These attributes allow a ranking of features based on the magnitude of change, as measured by polygon descriptors (area and volume) and changes in terrain parameters (elevation, relief, slope, aspect). The ability to do such a ranking points out one of the advantages of producing spatially explicit...

Summary statistics were also accumulated on the basis of the 1x1-degree tiles used for data management and processing. A total of 500 tiles contain topographic change polygons (see figure below), which represents over 53 percent of the conterminous United States tiles.

Many resource managers and geospatial data users are familiar with the USGS 7.5-minute quadrangle map series. Also, much of the geospatial data managed by the USGS was originally produced in tiles corresponding to the 7.5-minute maps. The topographic map quadrangles are still commonly used as base maps for outlining data collection strategies and defining project boundaries. Thus, it is useful to...

The spatial distribution of the topographic change polygons across the conterminous United States reveals some notable regional differences and patterns of change. Overall, there is a decided concentration of change polygons in the eastern United States, which can be partially explained by the greater population density as compared to the west.

The near-national extent of the topographic change dataset also allows for spatial comparisons, such as proximity of change polygons to roads and urban areas. Such comparisons have been done for the proximity of mines to roads and major cities for the five focus ecoregions. This figure shows the locations of the centroids of mining polygons within the five ecoregions and the locations of cities...

Because the topographic change inventory has near-national coverage, comparisons can be made among broad regions. This figure shows a set of five Level III ecoregions that were used as a basis for regional comparisons of topographic change.

When contrasting the general nature of anthropogenic processes versus other geomorphic agents, the visual impact of human activity generally is greater than that of natural processes.