A global analysis of how human infrastructure squeezes sandy coasts - Scripts & Data

Abstract Coastal ecosystems provide vital services, but human disturbances cause massive losses. In particular the nearshore development of infrastructure constrains the space for these ecosystems to adapt to shoreline retreat – called coastal squeeze. Nevertheless, coastal squeeze through infrastructure remains unquantified. Here we analyse 235,469 transects worldwide and show that infrastructure is situated at a median distance of 392 meter from sandy shorelines. 33% of sandy shores harbour less than 100 m of infrastructure-free space, and projections suggest that 23-30% of the infrastructure-free space will be lost by 2100 due to rising sea levels. Additionally, population density and gross domestic product explain 35-39% of observed squeeze variation, emphasizing the increasing pressures imposed as countries develop and populations expand. Although sandy shores are 4-7 times less squeezed in nature reserves, only 16% of world's sandy shores has a protected status. We therefore advocate incorporating protection in spatial planning to safeguard these critical ecosystems. ============================================== Methods The analyses rely on the following freely available datasets: OpenStreetMap - streets: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=7/52.154/5.295 OpenStreetMap - shoreline: https://osmdata.openstreetmap.de/data/land-polygons.html Global Urban Footprint: https://www.dlr.de/eoc/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-9628/16557_read-40454/ World population: https://data.humdata.org/dataset/worldpop-population-counts-for-world/resource/677d30ab-896e-44e5-9a31-05452bc3124b GDP per capita: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD Protected areas: https://www.protectedplanet.net/en/thematic-areas/wdpa?tab=WDPA Projected shoreline change: https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/18eb5f19-b916-454f-b2f5-88881931587e CoastalDEM: https://www.climatecentral.org/coastaldem-v2.1 In addition, we requested the sandy shoreline data from: Luijendijk et al. (2018) "The State of the World's Beaches", Scientific Reports 8: 6641; https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-24630-6 The deposited folder contains 4 subfolders based on the separate analyses presented in the paper. In each subfolder you find a Matlab script to run and accompanying datasets to load. A readme file is included, which further explains the scripts and datasets. Source data file In the data file Source_Data.xlsx, each sheet contains the data for one figure or table of the manuscript.