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In coastal regions, water, wind, gravitation, vegetation, and human activity continuously alter landscape surfaces. Visualizations are important for understanding coastal landscape evolution and its driving processes. Visualizing change in highly dynamic coastal terrain poses a formidable challenge; the combination of natural and anthropogenic forces leads to cycles of retreat and recovery and complex morphology of landforms. In recent years, repeated high-resolution laser terrain scans have generated a time series of point cloud data that represent landscapes at snapshots in time, including the impacts of major storms. In this article, we build on existing approaches for visualizing spatial-temporal data to create a collection of perceptual visualizations to support coastal terrain evolution analysis. We extract terrain features and track their migration; we derive temporal summary maps and heat graphs that quantify the pattern of elevation change and sediment redistribution and use the space-time cube concept to create visualizations of terrain evolution. The space-time cube approach allows us to represent shoreline evolution as an isosurface extracted from a voxel model created by stacking time series of digital elevation models. We illustrate our approach on a series of Light Detection and Ranging surveys of sandy North Carolina barrier islands. Our results reveal terrain changes of shoreline and dune ridge migration, dune breaches and overwash, the formation of new dune ridges, and the construction and destruction of homes, changes which are due to erosion and accretion, hurricanes, and human activities. These events are all visualized within their geographic and temporal contexts.

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This technical note (TN) will outline a framework to identify beneficial and cost-effective coastal beneficial use of dredged sediment (BUDS) projects. Creation of a BUDS framework that can be applied at scale will promote sustainable BUDS practices, facilitating the delivery of flood risk management, social, and environmental benefits while still fulfilling the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) navigation mission. This proactive forecasting approach uses multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and optimization tools to balance tradeoffs between navigation dredging and BUDS goals over project-scale timespans. The proposed framework utilizes available tools to quantify ecological system evolution and current and future dredging needs to develop a systems-level approach to BUDS. Required data include current and future information on (1) existing and planned natural and created aquatic ecological systems, which may include natural and nature-based features (NNBFs), (2) dredging requirements and costs, and (3) aquatic system physical and environmental data.