Coastal Services Center

Current Projects

Regional Coastal Water Quality

Coastal water quality and nonpoint source pollution are high-priority watershed issues for coastal communities. A needs assessment will be undertaken in the Northeast region to determine how state coastal water quality data and protocols can be better coordinated, displayed, and used for management decision-making. Regional staff members for the NOAA Coastal Services Center will identify local partners that can benefit from the training programs and tools sponsored by the Center for improving water quality. (2006-2008)

Understanding Coastal Resource Management Resilience Needs in the Northeast

Members of the coastal resource management community have begun to identify coastal hazards and prioritize their needs for improving or maintaining resilience in their communities. Armed with this information, the NOAA Coastal Services Center is inventorying and evaluating relevant management mechanisms, policies, and regulatory tools at the state and regional level to gain a better sense of how to assist these communities in their efforts. The results will be a regional approach to resilience that will resonate with the many partners engaged in this critical coastal management issue in the Northeast. (ongoing)

Needs Assessment and Social Science Tools Coordination and Technical Assistance

Surveys, needs assessments, and other social science-related tools are useful in gathering information and making informed decisions about coastal issues. The NOAA Coastal Services Center provides coastal managers and communities with technical assistance in the use of social science tools. Projects include assessing NOAA Coastal Services Center customer needs, at a regional level, for becoming resilient to natural hazards in the Northeast, looking at the impacts of climate change on the West Coast, and meeting the needs of the Pacific Island communities. This project provides technical assistance with survey design and analysis, and for the facilitation of meetings, workshops, and stakeholder engagement in projects across the country. Products will include the development of an economics primer and other guidance documents. (ongoing)

Coastal and Marine Habitat Classification and Assessment

The Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standard is an ecosystem-oriented framework for the identification, inventorying, and description of coastal and marine habitats and biodiversity. This structure provides a way to synthesize data so that habitats can be characterized and reported in a standard way, and data and information can be aggregated and evaluated across regional and national landscapes and seascapes. This effort will result in an analytical tool that provides managers with essential knowledge of habitat type and location, and access to habitat data sources. The focus for 2008 includes a habitat data inventory for the Gulf of Mexico, a seagrass status and trends report for Alabama, and additional sediment analyses data and classification within the Gulf of Mexico. (ongoing)

C-CAP Land Cover and Change Data

The Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP) is a nationally standardized database of land cover and change data within the coastal regions of the U.S. C-CAP products inventory coastal intertidal areas, wetlands, and adjacent uplands with the goal of monitoring natural and human-induced changes in these habitats on a one-to-five year cycle. Key efforts in 2008 include land cover and change maps and products developed with private-sector remote sensing contractors for the Great Lakes, Northeast, Pacific, and Caribbean Island regions. (ongoing)

Benthic Habitat Mapping and Classification

The Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standard (CMECS) provides a consistent and universally applicable coastal habitat inventory system. This project will link CMECS to ongoing mapping efforts in an effort to evaluate its usefulness as an analytical tool in establishing a habitat baseline and monitoring ecosystem changes. Mapping projects for 2007 in Texas and Florida include developing a “crosswalk” that will demonstrate where specific habitat types would reside within the CMECS framework. Similar activities may be developed in Rhode Island and California. (ongoing)

Understanding Coastal Resource Management

The Center will work with other parts of NOAA to evaluate the ability of Northeast and West Coast communities to identify and address the issue of hazard resilience. By synthesizing the regional results of the Section 309 Assessments and Strategies, and evaluating relevant management and policy tools at the state and regional level, the organization will gain a better sense of how to assist the coastal resource management community in building capacity to address hazard resilience. Recommendations from this assessment will be used to plan future work in the area. (ongoing)

NOAA Regional Collaboration Support

NOAA is furthering its commitment to providing relevant products and services to the nation. The NOAA Coastal Services Center has one or more members on five of the eight regional teams (Gulf of Mexico, North Atlantic, Pacific, Western, and Southeast and Carribean) developed to keep attuned to customer needs and deliver applicable NOAA products and services. The Center also serves on two of NOAA's four priority area task teams (hazard-resilient communities, and outreach and communications). (ongoing)

Regional Ocean Governance Support

Regional ocean governance is a strategy for managing ocean and coastal resources in a more holistic ecosystem-based manner. Operating across local, state, and federal jurisdictional boundaries, the process is coordinated by regional ocean governing bodies, providing the framework, mechanisms, and incentives that state and federal agencies need to coordinate their management efforts. The NOAA Coastal Services Center offers support for two regional ocean governing bodies: the Northeast Regional Ocean Council and the West Coast Governor's Agreement on Ocean Health. (ongoing)

Land Cover Mapping

Nothing provides a big picture view of land cover status better than these maps, which are developed using remote sensing technology. The NOAA Coastal Services Center has baseline land cover data for most of the coastal zone. The goal is to update the imagery every five years to also provide a means of detecting change or trends. The data is available free of charge from csc.noaa.gov/landcover.

Literature Review of the U.S. Northeast Coastal Community: Management of Coastal Ecosystems and Natural Hazards

This literature review focuses on needs in the Northeast region that are associated with ecosystem-based management and resilience to coastal hazards. The review serves as a foundational component of a greater needs assessment effort within the region. The needs assessment will confirm priority regional needs and will outline the services and types of expertise available from the Center and other NOAA programs and offices.
Northeast Literature Review (PDF)

Completed Projects

Beach Nourishment on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the U.S.

This project helps state and local governments along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the U.S. make informed decisions about the nourishment of beaches by consolidating the best scientific and technical information and tools for evaluating and understanding beach nourishment into one source. This resource is a user-friendly Web site that includes relevant information and tools from the fields of coastal geology, engineering, economics, law and policy, and the biological sciences.

Narragansett Bay Benthic Data

This project was conducted by the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management to create a critical resource inventory. This inventory will serve as the basis for a bay-wide approach to resource protection and restoration. The mapping effort was accomplished through the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program with primary photo interpretation by University of Massachusetts staff. NOAA Ocean Service’s Beaufort Lab and the Center also incorporated videography and single-beam acoustic surveys into the project.

National Estuarine Research Reserve System Data Rescue

This project was designed to provide state coastal zone management programs with access to an integrated data-sharing system that can assist coastal managers in their decision making. Data formerly in a hard copy format were digitized, with priority given to those data sets in danger of immediate loss due to media deterioration. Rescued data sets are accessible through the Internet via a geographic information system, and selected data and metadata were published on a CD­ROM.

Protected Areas GIS (PAGIS)

The PAGIS project brought compatible geographic information systems (GIS), geographic data management, and Internet capabilities to each of the nation’s 25 Estuarine Research Reserves and 13 Marine Sanctuaries. Through PAGIS, the reserves and sanctuaries also developed advanced data sets, underwent extensive training, and found innovative ways to make the most effective use of their new data and technological capabilities.

Rhode Island Habitat Restoration Portal

The Rhode Island Habitat Restoration Portal provides information about habitat restoration in Rhode Island to federal and state agencies, nonprofit groups, and the public. GIS-based decision-support tools allow users to interactively compare potential habitat restoration sites, especially focusing on seagrass beds, salt marshes, and streams used by anadromous fish. This information system can be used to apply for grants, select potential projects, educate the public, and assist coastal managers in restoration planning.

Rhode Island Hazards Training

The Center conducted a one-day hazard mitigation training workshop in Rhode Island. The purpose of the workshop was to help build local capacity for developing a regional Coastal Hazard Mitigation Plan. Training sessions addressed risk and vulnerability assessment, mitigation planning, mitigation funding opportunities, developing public-private partnerships, and community education and awareness.

Rhode Island Land Cover and Change Data

This project mapped terrestrial land cover in coastal watershed environments and identified changes in these areas that occurred between 1991 and 1997. The project relied on satellite multispectral imagery as the primary information source. These data were used to distinguish major land cover classes, and previous images were studied to locate areas that changed over time. For this project, the data were acquired according to the Center’s Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP) methods.

Statewide Hazard Risk and Vulnerability

The Center worked with the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency and Odeh Engineers, Inc., to conduct a statewide hazard risk and vulnerability assessment. The framework for the statewide assessment was first applied in the pilot community of Warwick, Rhode Island, and builds upon the methodology developed by the Center in the Community Vulnerability Assessment Tool CD-ROM.

Topographic Change Mapping

High-resolution Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) measurements of coastal beach topography were made during 2000. These measurements can be used for beach change studies and are available to the public.

University of Rhode Island Grant Management

The Center manages a grant to the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography to support the development of coastal data and information resources. This grant includes support of the Distributed Ocean Data System (DODS) and scanning of selected Sea Grant Depository documents. The DODS system provides the means for users to exchange oceanographic data and to transfer data digitally into an analysis package.