Regional Monitoring Programme

 The North West coast of England has a wide range of coastal features ranging from cliffs to sand dunes, open coast to estuaries, highly urbanised areas to rural coasts. All of this is important for economic activity such as ports, recreational use such as for walking or tourism and for its environmental value with most of the coastal areas designated as being of international importance.

This makes the management of the coast complicated with sometimes conflicting uses making demands on the coast such as the need to manage Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management (FCERM) with the other economic, social and environmental needs. This management is further complicated when we don't have the appropriate information on which to base decisions. It is for this reason that the agencies responsible for FCERM in the North West of England have developed a comprehensive monitoring programme that is funded through the Environment Agency to improve our understanding of how the coast is evolving.

In the past some monitoring has been undertaken but it has varied in scope and length of record depending on where you are on the coast. The new programme that is being co-ordinated by Sefton Council will ensure that monitoring is undertaken consistently around the North West coastline and all the data when collected is also stored and analysed in a consistent manner.

The benefits of this may take some time to realise as the value in the datasets increases as they get longer; this is because the longer datasets enable us to identify long term trends rather than short term variation and also provide us with more information about the extreme events. But this need for long term datasets has been recognised by Central Government and it is expected that the current three year programme will be approved for a further five years taking us to 2016 and that towards the end of each approval the programme would be reviewed and approved for further funding.

The programme has been developed to support DEFRA Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management objectives. It is managed by the North West and North Wales Coastal Group and includes 12 partners across the North West; 11 local authorities and the Environment Agency, with Sefton Council undertaking the coordinating role. There is currently a three year funding programme (2008-2011) that will feed data and best practices into the national programme for coastal monitoring which is based on a model developed by the Channel Coast Observatory.

Strategic monitoring will ensure that good quality data is collected and securely stored. The programme is risk based, with emphasis placed on areas at a higher risk of flooding or coastal erosion. Collected data will be made available online at www.channelcoast.org

Data collection

A wide range of data sets will be collected, these can be broadly split into two groups:

Forcing factors: the mechanisms by which energy is brought into the coastal system that drives the changing coastline these include waves, tides, wind and currents.

Coastal responses: the result of the impact that the forcing factors have on the coast. Monitoring includes beach topographic profiles, hydrographic profile extensions, LiDAR and bathymetric surveys, aerial photography, coastal habitat extents, sediment sampling and coastal defence inspections.