Cities Revealed Helps Predict Coastal Evolution

04 August 2009, 1:12pm

The GeoInformation® Group (TGG), publishers of Cities Revealed™ mapping solutions and UKMap™, announces that Sefton Metropolitan Borough Council (MBC) has taken delivery of historic aerial imagery for use within its Coastal Defence section.

The imagery provides the Council with a clearer understanding of how the coast, (extending 21 miles from Bootle in the south to Southport in the north) has evolved over time. The Coastal Defence section uses the images to ascertain the historic position of the coastline, identify historic land use, habitat extents and management activities that could have affected today’s coastline, and map sand dunes to understand how they are evolving and where the high impact areas were. This information helps to predict the types and rates of future coastal change likely to occur.

“By improving our understanding of the coast’s evolution we can make better sustainable decisions. This helps to reduce the likely cost to future generations through inappropriate developments”, comments Paul Wisse, Sefton MBC’s Information Officer, Coastal Defence section.

He continues, ”The photography has enabled us to get a valuable insight into the past and has allowed us to obtain some useful datasets that are otherwise unavailable or incomplete.”

Sefton MBC contracted TGG to scan and rectify the Council’s 25 cm resolution air photo prints captured between 1982 and 1994 into black and white, seamless databases. This information is now being successfully used alongside TGG’s previously supplied photography from 1940s, ‘60s and ‘70s within a number of coastal-based projects to map the historic position of its coastline.

Furthermore, Sefton MBC is using the photography within an EU-funded programme in which it is a partner. The Innovative Management for Europe’s Changing Coastal Resource (IMCORE) aims to enhance the understanding of coastal change and identify adaptation measures to be applied to coastal use and management. The programme uses the historic imagery to produce educational materials to test in Sefton MBC’s schools looking at methods of communicating the impacts of coastal change and helping children appreciate how the coastline is changing.

“By scanning and rectifying historic prints that may otherwise be gathering dust, Sefton is making good use of the wealth of information contained within the photography. It instantly becomes a readily accessible resource for monitoring coastal change, land use change, management activities and so much more”, comments Alun Jones, TGG’s Managing Director.

The GeoInformation Group offers an air photo scanning and rectification service as well as its off-the-shelf Cities Revealed Historic photography databases. The latter is available for the UK at 50cm resolution with additional urban centres at 10cm resolution or better. Cities Revealed Historic was captured by the RAF and Luftwaffe from the 1930s onwards including UK wide post war surveys.

www.citiesrevealed.com

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