Florida’s beaches are highly dynamic coastal features. They are vulnerable to accretion and erosion over time due to human interaction and climate change stressors such as storm activity. This research used a well-documented record of historical land surveys and literature, NOAA Historical Surveys, as a basis to calculate the movement of Florida’s coastline throughout history. This dataset of surveys contains digitized coastlines that represent numerous coastline positions between the years 1875 and 2000. The USGS Digital Shoreline Analysis System (DSAS), a software extension to Esri ArcGIS, was used to calculate a long-term change rate from 1875 to 2000 and a short-term change rate from 1950 to 2000. These change rates were overlaid onto georeferenced scans of historical land surveys to map the historical changes that have occurred in Florida’s coastline.
Florida’s Coastline changes can be viewed from the Esri Story Map at: https://arcg.is/1mnena
This work was conducted by Tucker Hindle and supervised by Mentors: Drs. Hongbo Su and Tsung-Chow Su. It is suppported by Florida Atlantic University Kelly Family Foundation Undergraduate Internships in Coastal Affairs.