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: ACD; Arctic Coastal Dynamics; Classification; Digital Shoreline Analysis System extension for ESRI ArcGIS; Thieler et al; 2009; Digitized shoreline indicator; LATITUDE; LONGITUDE; Net shoreline movement; Rates of positional changes; SAT; Satellite derived; Satellite remote sensing; Transect; UTM Easting; Universal Transverse Mercator; UTM Northing; UTM Zone; Yukon_Territory_mainland_coast; Yukon; Canada; North America; Arctic
• Online Access: https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.874343; https://doi.org/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.