Integrated Mapping of the Coastal Zone of Britain:
What Have We Learned and Where Do We Go From Here?

Matthew Harrison (1), Ceri James (1), Martin Whitfield (2), David Overton (3), Sal Philpott (1), John Pepper (2)

(1) British Geological Survey, Kingsley Dunham Centre, Keyworth, Nottingham (UK)
(2) The United Kingdom Hydrographic Office, Taunton, Somerset (UK)
(3) Ordnance Survey, Southampton (UK)

The coastal zone is a highly dynamic environment with importance for economic, environmental, cultural and recreational activity in the UK. Under recent European Parliament recommendation (2002/413/EC) integrated coastal zone management will assume a greater importance for member states.

The Integrated Coastal Zone Mapping project (ICZMap) is a joint government funded project undertaken by the Ordnance Survey (OS), the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO) and the British Geological Survey (BGS). The objective of ICZMap is "to provide a unified digital base map of the coastal zone of Great Britain, combining both onshore and offshore features." The creation of this dataset over the past two years has been a major undertaking by all three organisations. It has required the organisations involved and the steering group to work closely together to understand what each body is actually capturing in the field, the update cycles of this data and then how this feeds into workflows and map creation. Part of this process has been a series of workshops and presentations in England, Scotland and Wales, held to involve stakeholders and encourage participation in the development of the ICZMap framework.

Following two years of collaboration since it's introduction at CoastGIS '01. Reported here are some of the results and conclusions of ICZMap.In this presentation I will give an overview of the results of the whole project and then focus in more detail on some of the work that BGS undertook as their direct contribution to the project.

In the UK the three national mapping organisations have traditionally regarded certain physical aspects of the Coastal Zone as the perogative of one or other organisation. To take one example; OS map Mean High and Mean Low water, UKHO chart Lowest Astonomic Tide or Chart Datum. BGS produce geological maps with the OS Mean High and Mean Low Water current at the date of geological mapping. This can lead to discrepencies when all three datasets are displayed together. In this project we tried to resolve these differences for all three organisations.

The integration of BGS data into ICZMap has been addressed from two directions. Firstly we have proposed adopting up-to-date OS Mean Low Water definitions, bringing our data in line with OS products and resolving edge-matching issues resulting from different age maps meeting at the coast. BGS is also proposing to update current beach sediment classifications in the inter-tidal zone, using OS mean high to mean low tidal boundaries. This will provide a new dataset that will greatly enhance what is currently available.