Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune Intracoastal Waterway Shoreline Characterization

Critical military training and testing on lands along the nation’s coastal and estuarine shorelines are increasingly placed at risk because of development pressures in surrounding areas, impairments due to other anthropogenic disturbances, and increasing requirements for compliance with environmental regulations. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) intends to enhance and sustain its training and testing assets and to optimize its stewardship of natural resources through the development and application of an ecosystem-based management approach on DoD installations. To accomplish this goal, particularly for installations in estuarine/coastal environments, the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) launched the Defense Coastal/Estuarine Research Program (DCERP) as a minimum 10-year effort at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune (MCBCL) in North Carolina. The results of the first six years of the program (DCERP1) are presented here.The overarching objectives of DCERP are to: (1) understand the effects of military training activities, infrastructure development, and other coastal military installations; (2) develop models, tools, and indicators to evaluate ecosystem health; and (3) recommend adaptive management strategies to sustain ecosystem natural resources within the context of an active military installation.Shoreline characterization of the Intracoastal waterway within the foundries of Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune. Data was collected by ground truth methods and included boat operations. The shoreline of the ICW was characterized by boat in April and June 2010 using Global Positioning Systems (GPS) equipment and ArcGIS software. The previously digitized 2009 shoreline was edited within ArcGIS, using GPS equipment to obtain the position of the boat relative to the shoreline. Four fields were created for the shoreline shapefile, including: shoreline type, vegetation/species, modification type and relief. A unique identifying code was created by concatenating the field values of the four fields. in January 2013 the field Veg_2 was created for the output of SLtype and Vegtype codeing.