National Shoreline Change—A GIS compilation of vector shorelines and associated shoreline change data from the 1800s to 2010s for the coast of California

In coastal areas of the United States, where water and land interface in complex and dynamic ways, it is common to find concentrated residential and commercial development. These coastal areas often contain various landholdings managed by Federal, State, and local municipal authorities for public recreation and conservation. These areas are frequently subjected to a range of natural hazards, which include flooding and coastal erosion. In response, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is compiling existing reliable historical shoreline data to calculate rates of shoreline change along the conterminous coast of the United States, and select coastlines of Alaska and Hawaii, as part of the Coastal Change Hazards priority area. One component of this research effort documents changes in shoreline position, which are data used as a proxy for coastal change.
 
Using shorelines from the original USGS assessment with the addition of new shoreline positions extracted from 2009/2010/2011, 2015, and 2016 lidar data, rates of shoreline change were updated for the open-ocean sandy coastline of California. This effort includes revised rate-of-change calculations, improved rate metrics, and application of a proxy-datum bias correction on a transect-by-transect basis. Shoreline positions from the mid-1800s through 2016 were used to update shoreline change rates in California.