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Long-term and short-term shoreline change rates for the coastal region around Boston, Massachusetts, calculated with and without the proxy-datum bias using the Digital Shoreline Analysis System version 5.1

The Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management launched the Shoreline Change Project in 1989 to identify erosion-prone areas of the coast and support local land-use decisions. Trends of shoreline position over long and short-term timescales provide information to landowners, managers, and potential buyers about possible future impacts to coastal resources and infrastructure. In 2001, a 1994 shoreline was added to calculate both long- and short-term shoreline change rates along ocean-facing sections of the Massachusetts coast. In 2013 two oceanfront shorelines for Massachusetts were added using 2008-2009 color aerial orthoimagery and 2007 topographic lidar datasets obtained from NOAA's Ocean Service, Coastal Services Center. In 2018, two new mean high water (MHW) shorelines for the Massachusetts coast extracted from lidar data between 2010-2014 were added to the dataset. This 2021 data release includes rates that incorporate one new shoreline extracted from 2018 lidar data collected by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Joint Airborne Lidar Bathymetry Technical Center of Expertise (JALBTCX), added to the existing database of all historical shorelines (1844-2014), for the North Shore, South Shore, Cape Cod Bay, Outer Cape, Buzzard’s Bay, South Cape, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard. 2018 lidar data did not cover the Boston or Elizabeth Islands regions. Included in this data release is a proxy-datum bias reference line that accounts for the positional difference in a proxy shoreline (like a High Water Line shoreline) and a datum shoreline (like a Mean High Water shoreline. This issue is explained further in Ruggiero and List (2009) and in the process steps of the metadata associated with the rates. This release includes both long-term (~150+ years) and short term (~30 years) rates. Files associated with the long-term rates have "LT"; in their names, files associated with short-term rates have "ST"; in their names.

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Author(s) Marie K Bartlett orcid, Rachel E Henderson orcid, Amy Farris orcid, Emily Himmelstoss orcid
Publication Date 2021-08-31
Beginning Date of Data 2021
Ending Date of Data 2021
Data Contact
DOI https://doi.org/10.5066/P9YGIYFX
Citation Bartlett, M.K., Henderson, R.E., Farris, A., and Himmelstoss, E., 2021, Long-term and short-term shoreline change rates for the coastal region around Boston, Massachusetts, calculated with and without the proxy-datum bias using the Digital Shoreline Analysis System version 5.1: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9YGIYFX.
Metadata Contact
Metadata Date 2024-03-19
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License http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
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Harvest Source: Coastal and Marine Geoscience Data System
Harvest Date: 2025-01-06T09:34:50.952Z