A Shoreline Morphology Monitoring Program for Coastal Washington

Understanding the influence of natural and anthropogenic stressors and impacts on shorelines in Puget Sound is facilitated by data that permits analysis across spatial and temporal scales. In much of coastal Washington, though, shoreline data sets that are accurate, accessible and that cut across multiple time steps simply do not exist. This gap relegates our understanding of how shorelines have changed over time in Puget Sound to the realm of anecdote. As a consequence it also limits management effectiveness since the link between action and consequence in shoreline environments is often clouded with uncertainty. In order to address this gap Washington Sea Grant began a pilot program to measure season or annual beach morphology data at a number of sites in the Strait of Juan de Fuca starting in 2011. The program is designed to be long-term, and specifically to understand how shorelines respond to sea level rise and variability. In this poster presentation we will discuss the design of the program, and also share preliminary results from a selection of sites