New published article: Barrier island resilience assessment: Applying the ecological principles to geomorphological data
Aikaterini Kombiadou, Ana Matias, Susana Costas, Ana Rita Carrasco, Theocharis Plomaritis, and Óscar Ferreira presents
a novel methodology for barrier island resilience assessment, using geomorphological units and dimensions to describe the barrier island stability landscape as an actively shifting ‘topography’, reshaping in response to exogenous events and in relation to intrinsic properties. Accepting that barrier islands, like all natural systems, are dynamic, adaptively changing in response to external disturbances, is fundamental to the approach and especially important in face of rapidly changing external pressures and future conditions. The methodology is based on reconstructing resilience trajectories of barrier islands through identifying the distinct barrier states and related shifts (thresholds crossed) and assessing resilience dimensions and was developed and tested using multi-decadal geomorphological data for the barriers of Ria Formosa, in a sequence of gradually decreasing spatial discretisation, from individual transects to barrier sectors and eventually to entire barriers.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0341816220303052?dgcid=author