Techniques for Long-Term Coastal Change Prediction and the Significance of ‘Inheritance’

There is an increasing demand to make robust projections of coastal change over a range of timescales, to support coastal planning and management decisions. Shoreline management and coastal strategy plans typically consider short-term coastal change projections over the next 100 years. If this were not challenging enough, longer-term projections of coastal change over 1,000 or 10,000+ years requires development of new approaches capable of handling high levels of uncertainty.

This paper presents describes the development of a conceptual coastal change projection model and highlights some different approaches and datasets that might be used to conduct coastal change analysis over short to long-term timescales, based on specific casework conducted over the past 6 years. The use of spatially-referenced (i.e. map-accurate) aerial photographs and historical mapping, understanding the coastal geomorphology and processes, and a sound appreciation of the Quaternary ‘inheritance’ at the coast at a range of spatial scales are described in detail.

• Introduction

• Analysis of historical coastal change

• Inheritance in the coastal system

• Development of the conceptual model

• Work in progress

• References