Abstract
European coastal databases contain information on the evolution of European shorelines in the 1990s and the 1980s. We investigate if a shift toward erosion has been observed between these two periods, as it could be expected as a consequence of contemporary sea-level rise or changing coastal management practices. We select comparable European coastal sites, consider their state transitions as the parameters of a discrete-time Markov chain, and analyze their steady states in order to reveal underlying changes in shoreline evolution trends. The results suggest that European coastal wetlands and small beaches have initiated a shift toward erosion, which attenuates previous optimistic statements. Our results should be interpreted with caution due to the limited number of observations and presumed errors in the database. However, they suggest that the impact of contemporary sea level rise along European coastlines in the 90s may be more important than previously thought. Our results suggest that more research is needed to quantify the morphodynamics of muddy coasts and to develop data models able to represent coastal morphodynamic changes adequately.
Highlights
As climate is changing, identifying its signature in current environmental observations is becoming an important societal challenge (Stone et al, 2013; Brown et al, 2014; Cramer et al, 2014; Hansen et al, 2016)
The results presented in section “Dynamics of Coastal Evolution” show that small beaches and with limited human interventions are experiencing a shift toward erosion
We explore European coastal databases, with a specific focus on the temporal dynamics of shoreline changes
Summary
As climate is changing, identifying its signature in current environmental observations is becoming an important societal challenge (Stone et al, 2013; Brown et al, 2014; Cramer et al, 2014; Hansen et al, 2016). Detecting impacts of sea-level rise in shoreline evolutions remains difficult for the majority of coastlines, as the signal is often hidden behind the numerous natural and anthropogenic factors affecting nearshore sediment transport (Stive et al, 2002; Stive, 2004; Cazenave and Le Cozannet, 2014; Ranasinghe, 2016) This includes human interventions, the effects of the climate variability, including the North Atlantic Oscillation (Robinet et al, 2016) and the El Nino Southern Oscillation (Barnard et al, 2015, 2017), as well as other processes affecting the sediment availability at each local coastal site, such as the influence of estuaries (Castelle et al, 2017). In the case of Europe, regional sediment shortage may be an explanation to increased beach erosion, as the large amount of sediments that reached the coast during the last deglaciation are progressively being eroded (Paskoff, 2004)
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