Beach Monitoring for Enhanced Decision-making

Coastal zone management practices, regulatory decisions, and land-use planning activities along the southwest Washington coast have historically been made with insufficient information concerning the dynamic coastal environment. This lack of information can and has resulted in a mix of costly problems, legal disputes, risks to public health and safety, damages to resources and industry, and losses of critical facilities. To help address these problems, a regional beach monitoring program was implemented to collect coastal change data on a regular basis to enable decision-making based on up to date, technically sound information in order to more effectively manage a host of complex coastal problems. The monitoring program is quantifying recent beach trends and fluctuations as well as the spatial variability associated with short-term, seasonal, and annual environmental forcing. Data from this fledgling (begun in 1997) monitoring program is already being used by local and state governments for decision-making. Integrating this monitoring data with other data (long-term coastal evolution and geological inheritance) from the Southwest Washington Coastal Erosion Study to develop products that can be used for local coastal planning is a complex task involving communication and feedback between the scientific and management communities.