Emily A Himmelstoss
Biography
Emily Himmelstoss is a geologist with expertise in historical shoreline change analysis and the impact of geologic processes and human activities on the form and history of coastal beaches. She has more than a decade of experience guiding the development and testing of the Digital Shoreline Analysis System (DSAS) software, which is used by national and state governments worldwide in support of critical coastal decision-making and policy.
Emily has participated in the National Assessment of Coastal Change Hazards (NACCH) project since 2007, where the DSAS software enabled the measurement of shoreline change rates at 50-meter intervals around the coastal waters of the United States. These data and the new understanding of coastal change patterns it described have been widely used to further scientific research and coastal management goals.
Since 2012 Emily has been part of a team developing the NACCH web portal that uses new methods to visualize and access data, models, and tools for application by federal and state agencies, NGOs, municipalities, and private citizens. Development has used an agile software approach that has led to adopting this method on the DSAS software project, due to the ease at which this method allows rapid and flexible response to the evolution of the project through time. It is heavily interdisciplinary work that involves geologists, oceanographers, informatics scientists, and software engineers with expertise in database and human interface design. The portal currently provides direct access to NACCH assessments of extreme storm, coastal erosion, and sea-level change impacts.
https://marine.usgs.gov/coastalchangehazardsportal/
https://marine.usgs.gov/coastalchangehazards/research/long-term-change.html
Science and Products
Digital Shoreline Analysis System (DSAS)
Computer Software for Calculating Shoreline Change (or positional change of a boundary over time)
The Digital Shoreline Analysis System (DSAS) is an add-in to Esri ArcGIS desktop v. 10.4-10.6 that enables a user to calculate shoreline rate-of-change statistics from multiple historical shoreline positions. It provides an automated method for establishing measurement...
Long-Term Coastal Change
Goals of this task include developing and improving coastal-change assessments and supporting long-term planning and decision making to ensure sustainable coastal economies, infrastructure, and ecosystems.
Empowering decision-makers: A dynamic web interface for running Bayesian networks
U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientists are at the forefront of research that is critical for decision-making, particularly through the development of models (Bayesian networks, or BNs) that forecast coastal change. The utility of these tools outside the scientific community has been limited because they rely on expensive, technical software and a moderate understanding of statistical...
Digital Shoreline Analysis System (DSAS) version 5.0 user guide
OverviewThe Digital Shoreline Analysis System (DSAS) is a freely available software application that works within the Esri Geographic Information System (ArcGIS) software. DSAS computes rate-of-change statistics for a time series of shoreline vector data. DSAS version 5.0 (v5.0) was released in December 2018 and has been tested for compatibility...
Himmelstoss, Emily A.; Henderson, Rachel E.; Kratzmann, Meredith G.; Farris, Amy S.
National assessment of shoreline change: A GIS compilation of updated vector shorelines and associated shoreline change data for the Southeast Atlantic coast
Sandy ocean beaches in the United States are popular tourist and recreational destinations and constitute some of the most valuable real estate in the country.The boundary between land and water along the coastline is often the location of concentrated residential and commercial development and is frequently exposed to a range of natural hazards,...
Kratzmann, Meredith; Himmelstoss, Emily; Thieler, E. Robert
National assessment of shoreline change—Summary statistics for updated vector shorelines and associated shoreline change data for the Gulf of Mexico and Southeast Atlantic coasts
Long-term rates of shoreline change for the Gulf of Mexico and Southeast Atlantic regions of the United States have been updated as part of the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Assessment of Shoreline Change project. Additional shoreline position data were used to compute rates where the previous rate-of-change assessment only included four...
Himmelstoss, Emily A.; Kratzmann, Meredith G.; Thieler, E. Robert
Digital Shoreline Analysis System
Digital Shoreline Analysis System version 5.0