APPLICATION OF NEW SHORELINE ANALYSIS TOOLS TO COASTAL NATIONAL PARKS IN GEORGIA: THE AMBUR PACKAGE FOR R

National Parks situated along the Georgia coast are often subject to chronic erosion that threatens natural and cultural resources along select shoreline segments. Therefore, there is a critical need for determining spatio-temporal trends of shoreline movements to better manage and preserve these resources. Historical shoreline changes were investigated using the AMBUR package for R (www.r-project.org) for Ft. Pulaski, Ft. Frederica, and Cumberland Island National Parks. AMBUR provides a suite of tools to aid both coastal scientists and managers to analyze and better understand shoreline changes, as well as facilitate better planning and management of select areas and/or resources threatened by erosion. These tools are designed to take advantage of the statistical power and graphics engine of R. The benefits of using the R software environment to perform analyses are that it is free, open-source, and can be customized to perform not only advance statistics, but also additional geospatial & geostatistical functions. Georgia’s coastal National Parks contain a variety of shoreline types including sandy oceanfront beaches, semiconsolidated sediment banks and bluffs, and highly curved backbarrier shorelines. The AMBUR package provides robust tools for investigating these shoreline types in addition to shoreline morphologies unique to other regions of the world.