An Application for Regional Coastal Erosion Processes in Urban Areas: A Case Study of the Golden Horseshoe in Canada

Eric Vaz,Lisa Bowman

doi:10.3390/land2040595

Abstract

Urban growth has had unprecedented consequences on environmental sustainability and anthropogenic activity. The eroding coastlines throughout the world are subject to the massive expansion of urban areas and the accountability of sustainable hinterland landscapes. The Golden Horseshoe is Canada’s fastest growing region extending from the Niagara Peninsula and one of the most active economic regions in North America. This paper adopts a combined assessment of land use change and transitions in the coastal stretches of the Greater Golden Horseshoe. Comprising the urban expansion of the region between 1990 and 2011, an integrated assessment was carried out to: (i) detect changes in coastal lines along Lake Ontario; (ii) derive land use changes along the coast through spatial accounting matrices; and (iii) integrate climate change data for a combined assessment of future erosion loci. Visible erosion was found between the decade of 1990 and 2000, while certain areas have shown coastal recession in the southern region. The maximum recession was found to be 30 m, with an increasing urban sprawl of 19.8% between 1990 and 2000. A combined temperature increase of 2 °C over the coming decades brings the increase in urban heat islands leading to the importance of combined land policies to mitigate the common problem of erosion in vulnerable urban stretches and liveability concerning spatial resilience of growing urban regions in North America.

Highlights

This paper offers a systemic analysis of the combined morphology of urbanization and land use transition processes, in line with changes along the coastal line of the Golden Horseshoe
Information Systems and spatial analysis techniques provide important tools for accurate decision making, tackling the complexity of urbanization and accurate visualization of regional coastal changes when allied to monitoring land use allocation over time
The availability of several decades of satellite imagery and the advances in computational methods, have allowed to assess the Golden Horseshoe, a region of increasing demographic and urban change and debating with its future directions for sustainable development. This is the case in many regions throughout the world, where rapid sea level variability and impacts on vulnerable urban stretches are shaking the traditional limits of urbanization, and demanding new solutions on urban and coastal interactions

Summary

Introduction

There are many different types of coasts including soft-shores, rocky shores and cliffs, hilly or flat coastal plains, narrow or wide coastal shelves and wetlands [3]. Coastal zones are dynamic and not always the same size In some regions they can extend a few hundred meters wide, while in others can contain physical and ecological features that are interconnected further [4] to include watersheds, drainage passages, floodplains, mangroves, swamps, estuaries, salt marshes, beaches, dunes, wetlands, barrier islands, coral reefs and tidal flats [5]. Coastal erosion has been of great concern, as it corresponds to the gradual wearing away of the beach or shoreline sediment due to wave action, often in regions where anthropogenic activity occurs. The main difference between cohesive shorelines and dynamic beaches is that cohesive shores erode anywhere from 0.3 to 2.0 m per year and do not have the potential to accrete, whereas dynamic beaches have the potential to accrete [18,19]

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