USGS Map service: National Shoreline Change - Offshore Baseline

Beach erosion is a chronic problem along most open-ocean shores of the United States. As coastal populations continue to grow, and community infrastructures are threatened by erosion, there is increased demand for accurate information regarding past and present shoreline changes. There is also need for a comprehensive analysis of shoreline movement that is regionally consistent. To meet these national needs, the USGS National Assessment of Shoreline Change Project has collected and analyzed a comprehensive database of digital vector shorelines by compiling shoreline positions from pre-existing historical shoreline databases and by generating historical and modern shoreline data.

This dataset includes a reference baseline used by the Digital Shoreline Analysis System (DSAS) to calculate rate-of-change statistics. This baseline layer serves as the starting point for all transects cast by the DSAS application. The resulting rates of change are available in services with the titles USGS Map service: National Shoreline Change - Long-Term Shoreline Change Rates and USGS Map service: National Shoreline Change - Short-Term Shoreline Change Rates.

To make this shoreline data more accessible to the public and other agencies, the USGS created this web service. This web service was created utilizing ESRI ArcServer. This service meets open geospatial consortium standards.

The geographic information system (GIS) data layers from this web service are cataloged by state for ease of access.