The Coastal and Marine Geology Program of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in cooperation with the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management, has compiled reliable historical shoreline data along open-facing sections of the Massachusetts coast under the Massachusetts Shoreline Change Mapping and Analysis Project 2013 Update. Two oceanfront shorelines for Massachusetts (approximately 1,800 km) were (1) delineated using 2008/09 color aerial orthoimagery, and (2) extracted from topographic LIDAR datasets (2007) obtained from NOAA's Ocean Service, Coastal Services Center. The new shorelines were integrated with existing Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management (MA CZM) and USGS historical shoreline data in order to compute long- and short-term rates using the latest version of the Digital Shoreline Analysis System (DSAS).
All MA CZM shoreline data were appended to the USGS GreaterBoston_shorelines shapefile in ArcToolbox >Data Management Tools>General>Append and was renamed Boston_shorelines. The appended shoreline dataset was coded with the following attribute fields: ID, Route ID, Source, Date, Uncertainty (Uncy), Shape Length (Shape_Leng), Year, and Original ID.
This process step and all subsequent process steps were performed by the same person - Theresa Smith.
Boak, E.H., and Turner, I.L., 2005, Shoreline definition and detection: a review: Journal of Coastal Research, v. 21, n. 4, p. 688703.
Thieler, E.R., J.F. OConnell, and C.A. Schupp, 2001, The Massachusetts Shoreline Change Project: 1800s to 1994: USGS Administrative Report to the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management, Boston, MA, 26 p. + Appendices.
Any use of trade, product, or firm names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.