| description:
|
The NH Shoreline Inventory Project is an effort to create, for the first time, an important baseline dataset to inform coastal shoreline management decisions. Interest in NH integrated shoreline management has increased over the past few years among multiple stakeholder groups as the region is experiencing continuing population growth and development, water quality stresses, sea-level rise, and intensifying coastal storms. Following the December 2014 NH Shoreline Management Conference, several data needs were identified to help advance integrated shoreline management and policy that promotes important assets like human health and safety, natural resources, economic development, cultural and historic resources, and recreation opportunities, among others. One important data need is a comprehensive, spatial inventory of engineered structures along the New Hampshire shoreline that could be combined and compared with existing high quality data about natural habitats like salt marshes, sandy beaches, and natural rocky shores. This integrated dataset would be used to gain a better quantitative understanding of the state of the NH coastal shoreline, including the proportion of the shoreline that is subject to manmade hardened structures. New Hampshire Shoreline Inventory Project provides baseline information about existing engineered shoreline structures, including total spatial extent and coarse level information about type of structure. It also integrates information about key coastal habitats, including salt marshes, sandy beaches, and rocky shores. The engineered structures were digitized at a scale of 1:1500 using the 2013 Coastal High Resolution True Color aerial photograph collected by the Piscataqua Region Estuaries Project on August 24, 2013 (1-foot resolution) and the 2010-2011 Regional Very High Resolution Aerial Photography (6-inch resolution) available on NH GRANIT. The inventory includes enough detail to serve as the baseline/screening dataset for a more site specific inventory, a shoreline vulnerability assessment, and to identify candidate sites for "soft/living shoreline" approaches. It serves as an information source for decision-makers as they consider development of a Comprehensive NH Shoreline Management Plan and involves key experts in the Coastal Zone in order to ensure that the product is useful and usable. |