Historical shorelines for the Atlantic barrier islands of Virginia south of Chincoteague Inlet, 1949-2006

Historical shorelines for the Virginia barrier islands from Fishermans Island to Wallops Island were compiled from various remote sensing and ground-based sources. The COAST dataset (Dolan et al. 1978, Dolan et al. 1990) tabulated shoreline position based on historic aerial orthophotographs at transects spaced 50 meters apart located along the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States (South Carolina to New Jersey); only data for the Virginia barrier islands (1949-1988) are presented here. COASTS data are supplemented with more recent shoreline data digitized from aerial imagery (USGS 1994 and VGIN 2002) and collected with GPS (Fenster 2006). Baselines and transects used both to reconstruct the COASTS data and to produce shoreline positions and calculate shoreline rates of change using DSAS are also included. Note: there are some unresolved georeferencing issues that cause inconsistencies in the shorelines from different base data frames. Data from different data frames should be integrated with caution. Future versions of this dataset will resolve these issues.