Challenge

Updated and accurate shoreline maps are critical for Maine planners, especially since bluffs comprise 48 percent of the state’s 5,000-mile coastline. Many existing maps are over 20 years old and lack current information on development, erosion, and bluff stability. Coastal managers also need detailed data about the forces impacting shorelines to effectively plan, design, and permit resilient shoreline protection systems. To address these needs, the Maine Geological Survey, Maine Sea Grant, and the University of Maine engineering group sought to increase the precision and accuracy of new coastal bluff maps and improve other decision-support tools.

Solution

The partners combined remote-sensing data with NOAA’s land cover and Coastal Ocean Reanalysis (CORA) data to establish consistent, continuous data across the coastal zone. They extracted mean wave direction and significant wave height data from CORA to determine wave energy patterns along Maine’s entire coastline.…