The UK South Coast case study

Coastal case studies in the UK are located along the south coast between Selsey Bill in West Sussex and Portland Bill in Dorset.

Habitats found on this part of the coast include: shingle beaches; sand dunes; saltmarsh and mudflats; coastal grazing marsh; saline lagoons; reed beds and natural maritime cliff and slope.

For all the sites, BRANCH assessed the habitat distributions and surrounding land use. Changes in the extent of intertidal habitat were modelled for the next 80 years, using variable rates of sea-level rise and different coastal management options (see chapter 6, Annex 3, Final report).

• Studland
• Hurst to Lymington
• Isle of Wight undercliffs
• Newtown estuary
• Hamble estuary
• Langstone harbour

Analysis was then carried out at a regional scale to investigate options for habitat creation. This predicts serious losses of coastal habitats in the next 100 years due to climate change if we continue with current management policy. A change in policy is needed to reduce these losses and find potential space to create new habitats.

It is easier to identify substitute sites for habitat creation at this regional scale. It is important to provide compensation sites to replace lost habitats especially grazing marsh, where managed realignment of sea defences is undertaken. There are suitable locations to create grazing marsh but BRANCH analysis suggests it will be difficult to maintain existing habitat assemblages. Difficult decisions will have to be made to prioritise between different designated habitats where there is limited space.

Visualisations

To communicate the outputs of this coastal habitat modelling in a format that is accessible to stakeholders, BRANCH investigated the use of landscape visualisation technologies to present the results.

Chapter 7 in Annex 3 of the Final report describes the methodology that was developed and presents a number of examples of the types of images that were created during the project. Some of the static images for the sites are available here:

• Hurst to Lymington
• Isle of Wight undercliff
• Newtown estuary
• Hamble estuary
• Langstone harbour
• Sequence of Lymington present day, low sea-level rise 2080s, high sea-level rise 2080s
• Example of animated visualisation Hurst to Lymington (3MB mov file)

Further examples of animated visualisations are available on an external webpage of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. These are in AVI and Quicktime formats and are very large files see site. You will first need to email s.jude@uea.ac.uk to request login details.

The coastal habitat modelling in cell 5 has produced a large number of spatial outputs in the forms of image maps and shapefiles, where more than 65 scenario combinations are investigated. BRANCH partners have therefore developed an archive within a Geographic Information System (GIS) as explained in Chapter 5 of Annex 3 of the final report. This benefits the end-user by providing GIS analysis and visualisation capabilities which improves the usability of the Branch outputs. The archive requires arcgis to run and can be provided on CD. See contact us.

All of the habitat mapping work (Aerial Photographic Interpretation) carried out under this work stream is available through Local Biological Records Centres in South East England.

LiDAR data was collected by the Strategic Regional Coastal Monitoring Programme (SRCMP) and is freely available via that project's website at www.channelcoast.org.

<< Coastal options for adaptation