Shore-zone mapping of the outer Kenai coast, Alaska

Harper, J

This project documented and mapped coastal habitat on the Outer Kenai Coast of Alaska and was funded by the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council (EVOS). This report is intended as a general overview of the project and as a description of deliverables. The shoreline was flown and imaged during extremely low tides of June 2002. In addition to the georeferenced imagery, narration on the tapes provides a description of intertidal and subtidal biota, intertidal substrate and morphology and man-made features of interest. The 1,400, km of shoreline is documented on 17 miniDV (digital) videotapes. The video imagery and associated narration are the raw data for characterizing coastal habitat. The digital imagery was sampled and is posted to the web to allow complete public access. In a unique interactive website, sections of the coast can be windowed, a flight starting point selected and the user can "fly" the shoreline using forward-reverse and speed buttons of the imagery player (http://imf.geocortex.net/mapping/cori/launch.html). The Alaska ShoreZone Mapping Protocol (draft) was used to classify the shoreline in terms of biota, morphology and substrate. The mapping system has been applied to the entire BC and Washington shorelines, to Cook Inlet and an EVOS-funded project is currently underway to define an Alaskan standard. The system subdivides the shoreline into alongshore units and across-shore components and a variety of physical and biological data is recorded for each unit and component. This data can be displayed on maps through GIS. A total of 3,019 units and 9,993 across-shore components were defined for the 1,381 km of shoreline. Maps of a few selected coastal habitat themes are included as part of this report. More precise habitat units can be delineated by using specific queries of the database (e.g., delineation of sandlance spawning habitat by searching for protected shorelines with sand berms or sand & pebble berms). The complete spatial data set, documented by the meta-data forms, and the ShoreZone database are included as part of this deliverable. The data is potentially useful for a wide-variety of applications, including oil spill response, delineation of essential fish habitat, recreational planning and marine protected area planning.