Coastscan: Continuous monitoring of coastal change using terrestrial laser scanning

Sandy coasts are vulnerable to predicted climate change, but also need to safeguard coastal housing, recreation, safety and ecology. “Building with Nature” is an important approach for resilient coastal maintenance, but corresponding predictive modelling tools are partly inconclusive, due to a lack of measurements over multiple spatial and temporal scales. The aim of the CoastScan project is to develop a monitoring system to measure and understand dry coast topography over multiple scales with a permanent laser scanner. A field campaign was setup at Kijkduin, The Netherlands to monitor a kilometre of beach for up to 6 months. The first permanent laser scanning results show a promising ability to monitor the coast over multiple scales: hourly topography is obtained with a quality at the millimetre range, while time series at four different locations lasting 10 days show subtle variations that could not be compared before.