Citizen science for monitoring seasonal-scale beach erosion and behaviour with aerial drones

Abstract

Sandy beaches are highly dynamic systems which provide natural protection from the impact of waves to coastal communities. With coastal erosion hazards predicted to increase globally, data to inform decision making on erosion mitigation and adaptation strategies is becoming critical. However, multi-temporal topographic data over wide geographical areas is expensive and time consuming and often requires highly trained professionals. In this study we demonstrate a novel approach combining citizen science with low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles that reliably produces survey-grade morphological data able to model sediment dynamics from event to annual scales. The high-energy wave-dominated coast of south-eastern Australia, in Victoria, is used as a field laboratory to test the reliability of our protocol and develop a set of indices to study multi-scale erosional dynamics. We found that citizen scientists provide unbiased data as accurate as professional researchers. We then observed that open-ocean beaches mobilise three times as much sediment as embayed beaches and distinguished between slowed and accelerated erosional modes. The data was also able to assess the efficiency of sand nourishment for shore protection. Our citizen science protocol provides high quality monitoring capabilities, which although subject to important legislative preconditions, it is applicable in other parts of the world and transferable to other landscape systems where the understanding of sediment dynamics is critical for management of natural or anthropogenic processes.

Marine Citizen Science: Current State in Europe and New Technological Developments

“…This type of drones enable rapid surveying of beach volumes and therefore provide critical information for determining the dynamism of beaches. Pucino et al (2021) documented this work undertaken by citizen scientists using a protocol made by Australian scientists. The results show that citizen scientists' data were of comparable accuracy to professionally acquired UAV datasets.…”

sandpyper: A Python package for UAV-SfM beach volumetric and behavioural analysis

“…To the best of the authors knowledge, this is the first Python package with the specific aim to integrate within an erosion monitoring project employing UAVs and SfM. Moreover, it is the only package which currently implements the Beachface Cluster Dynamics indices (BCDs) computation, which are purposefully designed novel metrics to leverage the very high spatiotemporal resolutions and three-dimensionality of UAV SfM topographic data for quantifying subaerial beach morphodynamics (Pucino et al, 2021).…”

“…To date, volunteers flew 350 times, enabling the creation of a DSM and an orthophoto per survey (uncompressed file sizes from 5-100 Gb each). Citizen scientists and SfM are generating an unprecedented archive of imagery which can be reliably used to monitor high-frequency sandy beach volumetric dynamics and behaviors (Pucino et al, 2021).…”

“…Pucino et al, (2021). sandpyper: A Python package for UAV-SfM beach volumetric and behavioural analysis.…”

ADV-Based Investigation on Bed Level Changes Over a Meso-Macro Tidal Beach

“…At the same time, the beach serves as a natural barrier, a soft defense compared with human-made hard structures, to protect the coastal hinterland against flooding and extreme storm surges using wave energy dissipation (Rijn, 2009(Rijn, , 2010Slobbe et al, 2013;Stive et al, 2013). Hence, more and more concerns have been revealed on the mechanism of beach bed level changes since the twentieth century in the context of the higher frequency and greater intensity of extreme hydrological events (Vellinga, 1982;Rijn, 2011;Li et al, 2014;Masselink and Heteren, 2014;Hu et al, 2015) coupled with global sea-level rise (Nerem et al, 2018;Zhang et al, 2020), especially for low-lying coastal and island countries (Nicholls and Cazenave, 2010;Stive et al, 2013;Pucino et al, 2021).…”