Coastal resilience

Coastal Resilience is an ecosystem-based coastal and marine spatial planning framework that utilizes sea level rise, storm surge, ecological, and socioeconomic spatial information to identify and implement ecosystem-based adaptation strategies http://coastalresilience.org). Starting in Long Island in NY, the Coastal Resilience team has worked with local communities to map sea level rise and other coastal hazards alongside natural resources and human communities at risk. Communities are able to visualize this information via a web-based spatial decision support tool and identify potential impacts and adaptation options that can be implemented within their existing planning and regulatory frameworks. The Coastal Resilience project has expanded to multiple sites around the United States, including in the Gulf of Mexico, where it is now being used in the Gulf Restoration Decision Support tool (http://GulfRestorationDS.org) to help identify coastal habitat restoration sites (i.e. oyster reefs, salt marshes) that best benefit human communities. To date, three related but distinct web applications have been developed with similar goals, interface and architecture that all share a common code base. The individual sites are hosted on the Amazon cloud and utilize Esri's ArcGIS server technology. The client interface relies on the ArcGIS Javascript API, and has been developed in a modular, data driven approach. For example, in those Coastal Resilience applications that contain future sea-level rise and/or storm surge data, tools for analyzing and visualizing this data are automatically added to the web application via the application code base, relying on the data and services by utilizing a specific data model. When additions or modifications are made to the data the changes are posted to the site without modifying the code base. This is true for a number of other tools including a restoration analysis dashboard. The technical talk will focus on the architecture, data model and the project background.