ADAPTING WATERFRONTS
PAST
PRESENT
FUTURE
HISTORIC MAPS
HISTORIC ECOLOGY
BUILT ENVIRONMENT
CURRENT ECOLOGY
SEA LEVEL RISE
CITIES
San Francisco
Singapore
Philadelphia
Miami
RESILIENCE STRATEGIES
UPLAND
SHORELINE
IN-WATER
A Stormwater Retention Basin is a depressed landform that provides capacity for water containment of rainfall during storm events.
Green Stormwater Infrastructure retrofits existing streetscapes with rain collection that passes through permeable living planters to clean and slow down the flow into stormwater pipes.
A Managed Retreat strategically removes infrastructure and buildings from the most vulnerable flood prone areas and reintroduces the natural ecological habitat.
A Constructed Wetland is a new or restored vegetated tidal habitat that can provide flood protection and migrate upland with rising sea levels combined with a Managed Retreat.
A Seawall is an engineered structure that provides shoreline protection from waves and coastal flooding, while also retaining soil on the upland side.
A Living Shoreline mimics a natural shoreline habitat, providing erosion stabilization and protection with minimal impervious structure combined with plants, soil, and rocks.
Pier Structures are built on a static platform over water, which is supported by structural piles that are typically driven into bedrock below the seafloor.
Floating Building are constructed on structures anchored in place with underwater ballast that require on-site infrastructure and boat transportation if located offshore.
Artificial Reefs and Islands provide marine habitat and wave attenuation for the shoreline. Both are more effective in shallow water bodies.
Adapting Waterfronts logo: capital letters AW next to the words 'Adapting Waterfronts'
ABOUT THE SITE

Adapting Waterfronts is a prototype interactive web-based tool (currently in beta) that visualizes waterfront transformations past, present, and future to contextualize and inform potential resilience strategies in the face of sea level rise and climate change events. Its goal is to build place-based knowledge and serve as a platform for creative communication amongst diverse stakeholders.

USER INTERFACE

The interactive geospatial website allows for a three-dimensional viewing platform and clickable features. Past, Present, and Future maps can be toggled on/off and layered on top of each other. Historic maps make visible the unseen layers of time that illustrate waterfront transformations and pre-development tidal ecology. Present maps include three-dimensional buildings and show the current built and natural environment. Future maps contain sea-level rise flooding scenarios. Geo-referenced photographs give the user an eye-level street perspective of past site conditions. Three-dimensional Resilience Strategies visualize potential sea-level rise adaptation designs located In-Water, Shoreline, and Upland.

DATA SOURCES
Historic Maps

All historic maps are from the David Rumsey Map Collection. Images copyright © 2000 by Cartography Associates. Images may be reproduced or transmitted, but not for commercial use. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Sea Level Rise

The sea level rise data was created by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office for Coastal Management. These data depict the potential inundation of coastal areas resulting from a projected 2 to 10 feet rise in sea level above current Mean Higher High Water (MHHW) conditions. These data illustrate the scale of potential flooding, not the exact location, and do not account for erosion, subsidence, or future construction. Inundation is shown as it would appear during the highest high tides (excludes wind-driven tides) with the sea level rise amount. A detailed methodology for producing these data is available.

Map Layers

Additional maps layers were sourced from UC Berkeley Library, “GIS (Geospatial Information Systems): California & Bay Area GIS Data.” All data is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License.

Historic Photographs

Photographs were sourced from the Library of Congress online digital catalog and OpenSFHistory.org. Images were placed on their approximate location on the map through a combination of methods including photograph summary descriptions, on site observation, and previous geo-referencing by OpenSFHistory.

SUPPORT

This website was supported and developed as part of a Faculty Fellowship at the Digital Scholarship Center (now the Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio) of Temple University Libraries.

WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT & TOOLS

The map on this website is generated using the Mapbox GL JS JavaScript library and the clickable features were created using QGIS. The historic maps were georeferenced, converted to GeoTIFF format, and uploaded to Mapbox Studio as raster files. The sea level rise data was converted from geodatabase format into KML, and the resilience strategies were manually drawn in QGIS and converted to GeoJSON files. The menus operate using the JQuery JavaScript library and the horizontal sliders are an adaption of the glider.js tool developed by Nick Piscitelli. Additionally, the About this Site section uses the Magnific Popup lightbox plugin developed by Dmitry Semenov.

DISCLAIMER

The Adapting Waterfronts website is intended only for reference purposes. The data are provided “as is,” without warranty of their performance or use. All risk associated with the data and results is assumed by the user. All use of this website and reproduction of its content should adhere to the Creative Commons License and rules of each data source. The three-dimensional Resilience Strategies are meant strictly for visualization purposes and do not constitute an adaptation planning strategy, nor do they represent an endorsement by the authors of the website.

CONTACT

Email: adaptingwaterfronts@gmail.com