Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

iBluff: An open-source R package for geomorphic analysis of coastal bluffs/cliffs

January 30, 2023

The R package iBluff is designed for coastal bluffs/bluffs morphological analysis and offers an automatic and reproducible alternative to identify bluff edges using a bare earth digital elevation model (DEM) instead of hand digitizing. This package extracts elevation profiles along automatically identified transects on the bluff-face, bluff top, toe, secondary inflections, relative concavity/convexity of bluff-face, and beach dunes (crests and troughs). The package requires at a minimum a bare earth DEM as a raster and a generalized line shapefile (shoreline) approximately parallel with the bluff-face. Both files should be in the same projected coordinate system. The iBluff package was developed to expand and generalize studies of high-relief coastal areas, investigate erosion and seasonality, and could be extended to use three-dimensional (3D) point-cloud data instead of a DEM.

    Publication Year 2023
    Title iBluff: An open-source R package for geomorphic analysis of coastal bluffs/cliffs
    DOI 10.1016/j.softx.2023.101325
    Authors Monica Palaseanu-Lovejoy
    Publication Type Article
    Publication Subtype Journal Article
    Series Title SoftwareX
    Index ID 70240150
    Record Source USGS Publications Warehouse
    USGS Organization Geology, Minerals, Energy, and Geophysics Science Center
    Was this page helpful?