Quantification of shoreline movements along the Yukon Territory mainland coast between 1951 and 2011 ...

• Main Authors: Irrgang, Anna Maria, Lantuit, Hugues, Manson, Gavin K, Günther, Frank, Grosse, Guido, Overduin, Pier Paul
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: PANGAEA 2017
• Subjects: Transect; LATITUDE; LONGITUDE; UTM Easting, Universal Transverse Mercator; UTM Northing, Universal Transverse Mercator; UTM Zone, Universal Transverse Mercator; Digitized shoreline indicator; Classification; Rates of positional changes; Net shoreline movement; Satellite remote sensing; Satellite derived; Digital Shoreline Analysis System extension for ESRI ArcGIS, Thieler et al, 2009; Arctic Coastal Dynamics ACD; Arctic; Canada; Yukon
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.1594/pangaea.874343; https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.874343

The Arctic is warming, but the impacts on its coasts are not well documented. To better understand the reaction of Arctic coasts to increasing environmental pressure, shoreline position changes along a 210 km length of the Yukon Territory mainland coast in north-west Canada were investigated for the time period from 1951 to 2011. Shoreline positions were extracted from georeferenced aerial photographs from 1951, 1953, 1954, 1972, 1976, 1992, 1994, and 1996, and from WorldView and GeoEye satellite imagery from 2011. Shoreline change was then analyzed using the Digital Shoreline Analysis System (DSAS) extension for ESRI ArcGIS. Shoreline change rates decelerated to a mean rate of -0.5 m/a between the 1970s to 1990s, which was followed by a significant increase in coastal erosion to -1.3 m/a in the 1990s to 2011 time period. These observation indicate that the current rate of coastal retreat along the Yukon coast is higher than at any time before in the 60 year long observation record. ... : Total and annual shoreline movements along a 210 km long stretch of the Yukon Territory mainland coast were quantified, using a combination of air photos and satellite imagery. Aerial black and white photographs were obtained from the Canadian National Air Photo Library [NRCan, 2016] for the 1950s (i.e., 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954), the 1970s (i.e., 1972, 1976) and the 1990s (i.e., 1992, 1994, 1996). The usage of pictures from different years within the respective decades assured a complete coverage of the shoreline of the study area in the 1950s and the 1970s and coverage of seven short shoreline sections in the 1990s. The most recent (i.e. 2011) shoreline position was mapped using satellite imagery derived from the GeoEye-1 and WorldView-2 satellites [Digital Globe 2014, 2016]. Orthorectification of all aerial photos was performed by geo-coding all imagery to the 2011 satellite images using PCI Geomatic's Geomatica Orthoengine© software (2014) in the UTM map projection WGS84 Zone 7 North. The Yukon Digital ...