Shrinking Shorelines

I wanted to explore the effects of Beach Erosion in Southern New England. The scope of this study is the "Ocean State" - Rhode Island and four of its most densely populated coastal areas.

Recent studies completed for the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC) indicate that as much as 150 feet of shore has eroded since 1939, the first year that vertical aerial photographs were available that allowed quantitative assessment (Ref.1: Boothroyd). 

Target Audience:  General Public, Beach & Sport Enthusiasts, Regional & State Government Planners (Real estate/Tax), Environmentalists

What are your motivating questions and why did you choose them?

• I chose to solve the problem - How has the coastal beach front changed over the years? Are we losing ground? I would like to tell a story about New England coastal impacts and risks as erosion continues to take its toll along Rhode Island shorelines.


• Why? This topic is closely related to global warming. It's interesting to investigate correlations between erosion events and climate and hopefully you are are curious too.

Tasks:  Objective / Answers to Questions:

• What is the rate of shoreline erosion? Are certain areas more vulnerable?  Why?
• Coastal erosion is often expressed as a rate, as in feet per year. The shoreline does not erode so many feet per year, it erodes during storms. No storms, no erosion. Beaches are very dynamic. They build up and decline so “chronic yearly erosion” is a bit of a misnomer.  An unanswered question is whether climate change with warming oceans will either contribute to increased storminess, or to increased storm intensity, or both.  Either circumstance will lead to increased erosion and barrier beach areas are much more vulnerable. 


• What are the impacts to surrounding communities? (US New England States / County Boundaries)
• The So. region of RI has many densely populated communities and businesses. The impact of storm surges can be significant especially in sensitive barrier beach areas. Also, major transportation routes are along the coast and these will be impacted in storm events for the "smallest state of the union".


• How does the current map compare to 20 years ago? (more or less beach shrinkage/shifting sands)
• Why does shoreline shrinkage matter to Rhode Island? Can we hypothesize a correlation to global warming?
• There is a common misconception that erosion will result in the disappearance of beaches.  Not true.  The beaches will migrate inland with the retreating shoreline, unless a shoreline protection structure is in the way.  “there will always be a beach, it will just be in another place”

• Describe your design and why you chose the features you did.
• How do you use your application (mouse and keyboard functions, input/output, etc)?

Magnifier and Slider Bar - To scroll statistics, see sand loss(ft. in red) /gain ft. in yellow) per timestamp decades (curved blue lines are current and curved red lines are 1939 values)

Mouse over Pie Charts - To view images of key South Coastal Beach Areas on bottom right. Images change as user traverses the four different southern coastal regions. and on top right see Bar Chart - To view average footage loss per 20 year interval (1939-Current). As user scrolls through coastal barrier beach areas, the Average value has been calculated for erosion loss throughout seven decades. These raw values were obtained from GIS data (such as image for beach in magnifier above). Press Shift + Click Refresh in Browser - to clear browser cache to display applet

• What extensions and improvements can you suggest?
• It would have added value if "Major Storm Events" were overlaid with the Erosion data per decade. Also, I collected but did not use some multimedia clips. I wish I had more time to implement tabs or buttons or to get the slider magnifier bar in sync with the erosion charts.


• What did you most enjoy about working on this project? What was the most challenging aspect? What was the most frustrating? What would you do differently next time?
• There was an "Abundance of Data" . I spent time collecting, but some of the critical raw data was only found in images (rather than plain text). As such, I resorted to using ARC GIS v9.0 Software to try to export some of the GEO encoded data for areas mapped to erosion events. This lead me down a path of post-parsing data that was a bit too much (instead of time spent building the visualistion components). There are really too many tools and software libraries to choose from!

• Describe your data in detail: where did it come from, how did you acquire it, what does it mean, etc.
• I collected data scraped from the web, mostly government sites. Raw text data from images was manually parsed and compiled in tabular delimited format (tsv files import into processing sketch). I couldn't obtain the original GIS data so this was manually done (room for improvement - I'm not sure if OCR (Optical Character Recognition Sofware would have helped in this case).
• Link to locations2.tsv file

• Credits for Raw Data Points and Photos courtesy of Jon C. Boothroyd, RI State Geologist

Boothroyd J.C. and Hehre, R.E., 2007a, Shoreline change maps for Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island: Rhode Island Geological Survey Report 2007-1, (for RI Coastal Resources Management Council, 150 maps (scale: 1:2,000)).
Boothroyd J.C. and Hehre, R.E., 2007b, Shoreline change maps for the South Shore of Rhode Island: Rhode Island Geological Survey Map Folio 2007-2, (for RI Coastal Resources Management Council, 23 maps (scale: 1:2,000)).

• Many thanks to CSCI e171 classmates for publishing their homework sample code snippets and lively forum