This paper provides an overview of the latest developments in methodologies for assessing the vulnerability of coastal zones to climate change at regional and local scales. The focus of vulnerability assessment in coastal zones used to be on erosion and land loss due to sea-level rise. Methodologies now increasingly consider the wide range of climate and impact variables that play a part in det...

RAMSEY, E. III; WERLE, D.; SUZUOKI, Y.; RANGOONWALA, A., and LU, Z., 2012. Limitations and potential of satellite imagery to monitor environmental response to coastal flooding. Journal of Coastal Research, 28(2), 457–476. West Palm Beach (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. Storm-surge flooding and marsh response throughout the coastal wetlands of Louisiana were mapped using several types of remote sensi...

Communities along the USA coast are highly vulnerable to coastal storms. Trends in population growth, climatic events and land use are likely to exacerbate future damages. Coastal management entities are faced with decisions about how to manage resources in a manner that improves environmental quality and provides the maximum benefit for coastal populations. This is particularly true along the ...

Freshwater coastal prairie wetlands once covered large expanses of the Houston-Galveston landscape. A complex wetland matrix of mima mounds and low wetland basins known as prairie potholes provided important ecological services including habitat, lood control and water cleansing. Many of these areas were land leveled for agricultural and development purposes, erasing these features from the coa...

Freshwater coastal prairie wetlands once covered large expanses of the Houston-Galveston landscape. A complex wetland matrix of mima mounds and low wetland basins known as prairie potholes provided important ecological services including habitat, lood control and water cleansing. Many of these areas were land leveled for agricultural and development purposes, erasing these features from the coa...

Land use and land cover (LULC) was mapped using historical aerial photos (1940) and contemporary QuickBird satellite imagery (2003) for a 100 km2 area covering portions of Erie Township, Michigan, and Toledo, Ohio on the western end of Lake Erie. This area serves as a microcosm of conditions elsewhere on the Great Lakes coast, containing a range of human-altered to natural landscapes. Geographi...

My name is Gary S. Kleppel. I am Principal Investigator and Science Coordinator of the Land Use – Coastal Ecosystem Study (LU-CES). LU-CES is a multi-year, regional investigation of the effects of changing land use patterns and coastal development on the natural and economic resources of the salt marsh estuaries of the southeastern United States. The kinds of changes that we are concerned with ...

Google Earth (GE) provides very high resolution (VHR) natural-colored (red-green-blue, RGB) images based on commercial spaceborne sensors over worldwide coastal areas. GE is rarely used as a direct data source to address coastal issues despite the tremendous potential of data transferability. This paper describes an inexpensive and easy-to-implement methodology to construct a GE natural-colored...

CHAN, A.W. and ZOBACK, M.D., 2007. The role of hydrocarbon production on land subsidence and fault reactivation in the Louisiana coastal zone. Journal of Coastal Research, 23(3), 771–786. West Palm Beach (Florida), ISSN 07490208. We use a simple analytical model of reservoir compaction and a numerical model incorporating both reservoir compaction and fault slip to investigate surface subsidence...

Coastal waters represent the commingling of offshore marine and terrestrial surface source waters and therefore are naturally complex and variable. Our long term goal is to establish observational and modeling approaches to predict sources and scales of variability in the source waters, particularly those related to land use activities in upstream watersheds, from observations and measurements ...