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Shoreline Data

Providing shoreline data to the coastal community

Coastal National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI)

The National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) is defined as the technologies, policies, and people necessary to promote the sharing of geospatial data throughout all levels of government, the private and nonprofit sectors, and the academic community. The Coastal NSDI is based on the same premise, but its geographic scope is limited to the coastal and marine areas of the United States and its territories.

The shoreline is an integral data theme of the NSDI. Shoreline data are important for coastal zone management, environmental monitoring, legal and jurisdictional issues, ocean and meteorological modeling, planning, and many other uses. In the United States, the shoreline can be defined as the intersection of the land with the water surface. The shoreline shown on NOAA charts represents the line of contact between the land and a selected water elevation. In areas affected by tidal fluctuations, this line of contact is the mean high water line (Hicks, 1989).

Visit the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) Web site for more information.