Scientific article
English

Black Sea beaches vulnerability to sea level rise

Published inEnvironmental science & policy, vol. 46, no. Enhancing environmental management and policy-making in the Black Sea catchment through improved data sharing, p. 95-109
Publication date2015
Abstract

Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) aims to promote sustainable management of coastal zones based on ecosystem and holistic management approaches. In this context, policies have to consider the complex interactions that influence the fragile equilibrium of coastal ecosystems. Beaches represent both valuable and vulnerable natural resources because of the various ecosystem services they provide and their sensitivity to climate change and sea level rise. We present the first comprehensive digital record of all Black Sea beaches and provide a rapid assessment of their erosion risk under different scenarios of sea level rise. Through the digitisation of freely available remote-sensed images on the web, we provide broad information on the spatial characteristics and other attributes of all Black Sea beaches (e.g. photo-based visual estimation of the sediment type, presence of coastal defences, urban development). These data have been assembled and stored in full Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) – allowing spatial queries, visualisation and data sharing – and are therefore particularly interesting to feed/supply web-GIS portals (coastal atlases) for visualisation purpose, spatial queries or spatial indicators calculations. The resulting Black Sea beaches database contains 1228 beaches, with a total coastline length of 2042 km with an area of 224 km2.

Keywords
  • Beach erosion
  • Black Sea
  • ICZM
  • Sea level rise
  • SDI
Citation (ISO format)
ALLENBACH, Karin et al. Black Sea beaches vulnerability to sea level rise. In: Environmental science & policy, 2015, vol. 46, p. 95–109. doi: 10.1016/j.envsci.2014.07.014
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Article (Published version)
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Identifiers
Journal ISSN1462-9011
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