A Geo Information System (GIS) for circum-arctic coastal dynamics

Coastal erosion forms a major source of the sediment, organic carbon and nutrient flux into the arctic basin. Recent studies indicate that sediment input resulting from the erosion of ice-rich, permafrost-dominated coasts might be equal to or greater than river input. The program Arctic Coastal Dynamics (ACD) has been developed to improve our understanding of circum-arctic coastal dynamics as a function of environmental forcing, coastal geology, geocryology and morphodynamic behavior. Under this framework a circum-arctic Geo Information System (GIS) has been developed, which is applied to display generalized information on coastal characteristics and to analyse coastal material fluxes. The coastal GIS is based on a digital elevation model, which was constructed from the International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean, and permafrost parameters adopted from the Circumpolar Active-Layer Permafrost System. A segmentation of the Laptev Sea coastline was performed as a first step towards a GIS-based quantification of the sediment and total organic carbon (TOC) fluxes resulting from coastal erosion