New Zealand Coastal Characteristics Database (NZL-CCD)

This dataset presents a New Zealand Coastal Characteristics Database (NZL-CCD), offering a comprehensive suite of indicators describing the morphological, environmental, and human-influenced characteristics of 1,750 sandy beaches across the entire coastline of New Zealand. The database integrates a variety of geospatial sources to derive beach morphological properties, high-resolution elevation-based coastal slopes, natural environmental drivers, and socio-economic indicators, all consistently aggregated at the beach unit scale. A total of 12 variables are provided for each beach polygon, capturing the multi-dimensional nature of coastal processes and human interactions. The morphological indicators include beach area, length, width, and curvature, extracted from OpenStreetMap-labeled beach polygons using a minimum bounding geometry and segmentation strategy. Coastal slopes were derived from 1-meter resolution airborne LiDAR DEMs, enabling detailed characterization of intertidal topography with high vertical accuracy (0.2 m). The natural environmental indicators include mean sea level, storm surge residuals, tidal elevation, total water level, wind speed, and significant wave height. These were extracted primarily from the CoDEC-ERA5 reanalysis product and IMOS altimetry-derived wave datasets, representing historical and climatological oceanographic conditions from 1984 to 2024. The socio-economic indicators—namely, population density and built-up area—were obtained from the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) for the year 2020, serving as proxies for anthropogenic pressure and urban exposure along the coastal zone. By combining high-resolution elevation data, dynamic environmental forcings, and human exposure metrics, this dataset supports multivariate analyses of coastal slope variability and its natural and anthropogenic drivers. It provides a valuable foundation for vulnerability assessments, coastal modeling, and policy-relevant coastal management research in the context of sea-level rise and coastal change.