The coastlines of the world host a rich mix of dense populations, varying industries, and environmental characteristics that are collectively influenced by both land and sea. To facilitate the production of knowledge and data products regarding these complex coastal regions, the European Commission under the Copernicus program has developed a new online resource: The Copernicus Coastal Hub. The Coastal Hub offers a singular resource for data related to coastal regions including examples of use cases and an interactive data and map viewer.
The site provides a number of different use cases for the application of coastal focused datasets within the repository that could inform data-driven decision making within various sectors of research, government, and private industry. These uses are divided into three themes, water, pollution, and spatial planning, and include examples and case studies of the uses of coastal data in different parts of the world. For the disaster risk management community, the site offers examples of data used for hazard mapping, risk assessment, preparedness assessment, and applications for specific hazards such as flooding, drought, tsunamis, and coastal erosion. These specific use cases can further be elaborated upon by the information hosted in the Coastal Hubs data viewer.
The Costal Hub Data Viewer is a tool that offers both an extensive list of coastal data products hosted by the website, and a visualization tool for quick representation of these products. It currently hosts a number of data products such as past flood risk indicators for Europe, forecasts for river discharge, water level change, ocean wave analysis, and many more. These datasets and their associated layers can be quickly mapped using the Data Viewer and then requested for download.
