APPLICATION OF A NEW COASTAL HAZARD VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENT TOOL TO THE SOUTHEASTERN UNITED STATES: AMBUR-HVA

As development continues within the coastal zone of the southeastern U.S., the vulnerability of populations to shoreline erosion and flooding/inundation are becoming more of a focus of scientists and managers. Recently, a new software tool was developed called AMBUR-HVA (Hazard Vulnerability Assessment) to assess these threats while also incorporating socio-economic data to better determine what populations are at risk. AMBUR-HVA is a package using the R programming environment that utilizes shoreline change data from the original AMBUR package and datasets available from NOAA and other federal agencies. The outputs from the tool include geospatial data with HVA rankings of 1 (low) to 5 (high) vulnerability due to shoreline change, inundation, and socio-economic factors. An integrated dataset is also produced where all outputs are combined into a composite HVA rank. Results are output as geospatial files for use in GIS and further analysis of patterns. This tool was used to assess the vulnerability of pilot regions in NC, SC, GA and FL, highlighting regions of particular vulnerability. This talk will discuss results from the HVA analysis, while highlighting the utility of the shoreline change vulnerability module, which assesses vulnerability over a number of temporal and spatial scales, and provides a more robust measure of shoreline change vulnerability. These results are currently being used by managers in several states to enable better estuarine and coastal decision-making.