state of the coast (Toestand van de kust) : case study: North Holland

Over more than a thousand years, the Dutch coast has been eroding for large stretches. Coastal retreat puts coastal functions (e.g. safety against flooding) under pressure. Since 1990, the Dutch policy aims at preventing further retreat of the coastline, but in the meantime taking the valuable dynamical behaviour of the coast into account. Therefore, sand nourishments have been preferred over hard structures to counteract the systematic erosion. Due to its strategic importance, the Dutch coastal area is also one of the most extensive studied areas in the world. However, most of the morphological research so far has focussed into the understanding of just part of the Dutch coastal system (e.g. dune area, foreshore). Hardly any attempt has been made to describe in a quantitative way the complete morphodynamic development of the system from the dunes to deep water and the cumulative effect of the past nourishment strategy at various time- and spatial scales. The aim of this study is the assessment of the functioning of the complete coastal system through a number of indicators describing the morphological system at different time scales.