SCShores: a comprehensive shoreline dataset of Spanish sandy beaches from a citizen-science monitoring programme

Sandy beaches are ever-changing environments, as they experience constant reshaping due to the external forces of tides, waves, and winds. The shoreline position, which marks the boundary between water and sand, holds great significance in the fields of coastal geomorphology, coastal engineering, an...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inEarth system science data Vol. 15; no. 10; pp. 4613 - 4629
Main Authors González-Villanueva, Rita, Soriano-González, Jesús, Alejo, Irene, Criado-Sudau, Francisco, Plomaritis, Theocharis, Fernàndez-Mora, Ãngels, Benavente, Javier, Del Río, Laura, Nombela, Miguel Ángel, Sánchez-García, Elena
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Katlenburg-Lindau Copernicus GmbH 19.10.2023
Copernicus Publications
Subjects
Beaches
Changing environments
Climate change
Coastal engineering
Coastal geomorphology
Coastal management
Coastal zone management
Coasts
Crowdsourcing
Datasets
Environmental changes
Geomorphology
Monitoring
Monitoring systems
National parks
Planning
Remote sensing
Science
Scientists
Shorelines
Winds
Spain
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Sandy beaches are ever-changing environments, as they experience constant reshaping due to the external forces of tides, waves, and winds. The shoreline position, which marks the boundary between water and sand, holds great significance in the fields of coastal geomorphology, coastal engineering, and coastal management. It is crucial to understand how beaches evolve over time, but high-resolution shoreline datasets are scarce, and establishing monitoring systems can be costly. To address this, we present a new dataset of the shorelines of five Spanish sandy beaches located in contrasting environments that is derived from the CoastSnap citizen-science shoreline monitoring programme. The use of citizen science within environmental projects is increasing, as it allows both community awareness and the collection of large amounts of data that are otherwise difficult to obtain. This dataset includes a total of 1721 individual shorelines composed of 3 m spaced points alongshore, accompanied by additional attributes, such as elevation value and acquisition date, allowing for easy comparisons. Our dataset offers a unique perspective on how citizen science can provide reliable datasets that are useful for management and geomorphological studies. The shoreline dataset, along with relevant metadata, is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8056415 (González-Villanueva et al., 2023b).
ISSN:1866-3516
1866-3508
1866-3516
DOI:10.5194/essd-15-4613-2023