Assessing habitat change and migration of barrier islands

A barrier island habitat prediction model was used to forecast barrier island habitats (for example, beach, dune, intertidal marsh, and woody vegetation) for Dauphin Island, Alabama, based on potential island configurations associated with a variety of restoration measures and varying future conditions of storminess and sea level (Enwright and others, 2020). This USGS data release contains five habitat model predictions from the aforementioned modeling effort. These include: (1) the contemporary period (that is, 2015); (2) with action Year 0 (that is, hypothetically, predicted habitat coverage in 2128 based on our sea-level change rate); (3) with action Year 10 (that is, predicted habitat coverage after ten years of morphodynamic modeling with simulated storms); (4) without action Year 0; and (5) without action Year 10. Additionally, this data release includes change maps that highlight changes over the decadal simulation (that is, Year 0 to Year 10) with and without action, respectively, along with the difference between Year 10 for the with and without the action simulation. For more information on the habitat model methodology and results, see the publication listed in the larger work section of this metadata (Enwright and others, 2020) and Enwright and others (in review).