Final Report -Title: Coastal Ecosystem Assessment, Development, and Creation of a Policy Tool using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for A Case Study of Western Puerto Rico Coastal Region -Name and affiliation of researchers: Jonathan Muñoz Ph.D. Associate Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez
-Background Coastal monitoring is fundamental to understand the morphological changes in coastal environments and the vulnerability of low-lying coasts to erosion and flooding. For this reason, this study was focused on monitoring coastal erosion in different areas distributed along the western region of Puerto Rico using small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These UAVs provided rapid-assessment and high-resolution images for shoreline monitoring from 2016 to 2018. The images served to establish a baseline aerial analysis useful to quantify the erosion rate using the Digital Shoreline Analysis System (DSAS) and computing the rate-of-change statistics of the coastal zones from multiple historic (1930 to 2010) shoreline positions. In addition, XBeach was implemented to simulate swell events generated by Hurricane Matthew (Category 4) in 2016. The results demonstrated the synergy of low-cost small UAV surveys and XBeach modeling to monitor the coastal zones and determine morphological changes in coastal environments. Other tasks from this work included outreach and educational training on UAVs for environmental monitoring. One special topic course - INCI 4998 Geospatial Mapping Using UAVs, was offered at the Department of Civil Engineering (spring 2017), two students were sponsored to obtain their FAA – Small UAV Pilot and one graduate student completed her thesis using data gathered by this research initiative. -Results and findings: UAV Monitoring: All observational sites that encompass the denoted Caribbean Littoral Aerial Surveillance System (CLASS) were established and the historical shoreline position and erosion rate from 1930 to 2018 determined (Appendix A – Progress Report March 2018). During the performing period of this project; 2 major storms directly impacted Puerto Rico. On September 6, 2017, hurricane Irma passed north of Puerto Rico causing adverse maritime conditions and on September 20, 2017, hurricane Maria (Category 4 - Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale) directly impacted Puerto Rico, causing major storm surges and floods across the coastal region. An extensive data collection program was executed. Aerial imagery was collected for Hurricane’s Irma and Maria. As well, a new set of aerial images was acquired 180 and 365 days after the Hurricane Maria. All images were post-processed to observe the shortterm recovery of the coastal zone and are available to the scientific community.