Difference between revisions of "Marshfield Coastal Adaptation Annotated Bibliography"

From coastalwiki
Jump to: navigation, search
(→‎Historical Maps: added 1870-era map reference)
m (→‎Historical Maps)
Line 113: Line 113:
 
* 1838 Map of Marshfield, showing dwellings and roads (Harvard Geospatial Library)
 
* 1838 Map of Marshfield, showing dwellings and roads (Harvard Geospatial Library)
 
* 1857 Map of Plymouth County (Harvard Geospatial Library)
 
* 1857 Map of Plymouth County (Harvard Geospatial Library)
−
* circa 1878 Map of Marshfield, showing dwellings and roads (for example, in lobby of Marshfield Orthodontics office)
+
* 1879 Map of Marshfield, showing dwellings and roads (for example, in lobby of Marshfield Orthodontics office)
 
* circa 1900 "historic 15-minute USGS topographic map of the Duxbury, Massachusetts quadrangle. The survey date (ground condition) of this map is 1885, the edition date is September, 1893 and this map was reprinted in 1931" (Harvard Geospatial Library) So, supposedly 1885, but it shows the river mouth north of Humarock, which dates it after 1898.
 
* circa 1900 "historic 15-minute USGS topographic map of the Duxbury, Massachusetts quadrangle. The survey date (ground condition) of this map is 1885, the edition date is September, 1893 and this map was reprinted in 1931" (Harvard Geospatial Library) So, supposedly 1885, but it shows the river mouth north of Humarock, which dates it after 1898.
  

Revision as of 12:51, 28 February 2014

This website is still in active development.

This website is an annotated bibliography for tracking interesting research articles, news coverage, references, and online resources relevant to issues of climate change adaptation in the coastal community of Marshfield, Massahcusettes, USA. Much of it will likely be useful for other communities in a similar situation.

The information here has been gathered and edited by the members of the Town of Marshfield's Coastal Advisory Committee, which reports to the Town's Board of Selectmen. The site is hosted by committee member Dr. Sean P. Robinson, with thanks to the Helena Foundation Junior Physics Laboratory in the Department of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This bibliography represents a partial response to those line items in the Committee's mission statement which pertain to educating the public on the complicated issues of climate change and adaptation. It also summarizes the Committee members' efforts to advance their own knowledge of adaptation strategies to sea level rise and related climate change phenomena in coastal communities like Marshfield.

This website is very much a work in progress. (Page started October 2013.)


Contents

Agencies and Organizations

Management of coastal risks involves a complex set of public agencies and private partners. The following is a partial list of some of the involved parties. In the future, this list will be expanded with commentary on the roles of each of these bodies and how they relate to each other in regards to managing coastal adaptation.

Government

Private

GIS Resources

Geographical Information Systems, or GIS, is a set of technological tools for placing data layers on maps. Basic skills in and access to GIS tools are essential to any research-based approach to coastal adaptation. The following set of links may help people get a start in casual GIS usage, although professional level applications of GIS often require expertise derived from extensive training and fairly powerful computers running expensive, specialized software.

Climate Change and Adaptation

One of the principle drivers (but not the only one) of the need for adaptation measures in coastal communities is climate change. Therefore, a solid grasp of the scientific understanding and explanation of climate change is necessary for making educated judgments about coastal adaptation. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the information most readily available to the public on this subject is of a quality that ranges from unusably oversimplified to outright bogus, although the communication skill of the media outlets or political pundits reporting the information may give it the illusion of reliability. Much of this media reporting also couches the reporting of climate change science within a political "pro versus con" narrative which is absent in the science itself, but presumably makes the story more entertaining for its readers. (Incidentally, media reports of both the "pro" and "con" variety are equally subject to the lack of reliability cited above.) The Coastal Advisory Committee hopes to be able to sort through and present some of the available content on climate change and adaptation measures which is reliable, accessible, and relevant for residents of coastal communities like Marshfield. At present, this content is just the loosely organized set of references below, but should be refined and expanded with explanatory language as time goes on.

Web Sites

Research Articles

Books

News and other Press

Historical Marshfield

It seems that people have not always built their homes in the vulnerable coastal areas of Marshfield. It's a relatively recent thing, where "recent" is less than about 150 years. But, exactly when and why did this start? Understanding the answer to this question would help with two areas of relevance to coastal adaptation today:

  1. decipher what the "natural" profile of Marshfield's coastal areas might look like without coastal protection structures and land development, and
  2. bring some perspective in judging which adaptation strategies are "reasonable" in the big picture that extends beyond the limited scope of experience of today's residents.

Historical Resources and Groups

General Histories and Contemporaneous Descriptions

Historical Maps

  • 1776 Boston and Vicinity, not very accurate (Harvard Geospatial Library)
  • 1781 Nautical Chart of Plymouth Bay (Harvard Geospatial Library)
  • 1838 Map of Marshfield, showing dwellings and roads (Harvard Geospatial Library)
  • 1857 Map of Plymouth County (Harvard Geospatial Library)
  • 1879 Map of Marshfield, showing dwellings and roads (for example, in lobby of Marshfield Orthodontics office)
  • circa 1900 "historic 15-minute USGS topographic map of the Duxbury, Massachusetts quadrangle. The survey date (ground condition) of this map is 1885, the edition date is September, 1893 and this map was reprinted in 1931" (Harvard Geospatial Library) So, supposedly 1885, but it shows the river mouth north of Humarock, which dates it after 1898.

Recreational and Residential Buildup

  • Several of the above listed general histories contain scattered references to a rapid build-out of real estate in what had previously been the mostly undeveloped coastal areas of Marshfield (now called Fieldston, Ocean Bluff, and Brant Rock; extending partly into the existing villages of Green Harbor and Rexhame) over several decades starting in the 1860s in support of a tourism industry centered on the then-new concept of the sea side resort. Hotels, casinos, and related attractions concentrated around what is now the Brant Rock Esplanade, with the remainder of the build-out seeming to have consisted largely of residential structures intended for a seasonal population rather than permanent homes. Presumably, these beginnings of Marshfield as a tourist destination were part of the larger Victorian trends of keeping a second home near the beach as an upper class status symbol and the emergence of "going to the beach" as a novel recreational activity. It is also likely not unrelated to the arrival of the railroad in Marshfield circa 1870. However, rigorous historical analysis of these guesses is presently lacking. Likewise, there is little historical anlaysis of what brought the era of the Brant Rock hotels to an end, or what socioeconomic dynamics drove the eventual transition to more year-round occupation of the coastal areas.
  • The Fairview Inn history page claims that the building originally at the Fairview site was one of six Brant Rock inns built in the 1860s and 1870s.

The Portland Gale

The "Portland Gale" is the popular name of a major storm which brought much loss of life and property to coastal Massachusetts in late November, 1898. In Marshfield, it is most notable for having changed the mouth of the North and South Rivers, so that they meet and empty into the sea at the north end of the Humarock peninsula, rather than at the south end (now Rexhame Beach). "The Portland Gale" is the answer to a question which confuses many new Marshfield and Scituate residents: "Why is Humarock part of Scituate when it is only connected to Marshfield?"

NFIP, FIRMs, FEMA, and all that

Coastal adaptation planning focuses primarily on issues several years or decades into the community's future. However, vulnerable coastal communities are already threatened today in a variety of ways. Managing the complex physical challenges of climate change requires that it be understood together with a similarly complex web of economic pressures and governmental regulations from the local to federal level. One example of this is the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The affordability or otherwise of flood insurance for homes and business in flood-prone areas can have a major effect on determining what type of community can be sustained in those areas. As such, a topical understanding of NFIP is important for coastal adaptation planners. Resources to aid that understanding are documented here. On the other hand, the management of municipal NFIP procedures for a particular mapping cycle, such as FIRM appeals or CRS certification, while critical to the immediate needs of coastal communities, is not itself part of long-term adaptation planning. Timely response to these immediate needs should be addressed through a separate dedicated effort. In Marshfield, NFIP response is handled by the central administration in Town Hall, notably aided by the commendable efforts of the Marshfield Citizens Coastal Coalition citizen advocacy group.

General NFIP resources

2013 Mapping Cycle

News Coverage

Maps and Documentation

Retrieved from "http://jlab.mit.edu/coastal/index.php?title=Marshfield_Coastal_Adaptation_Annotated_Bibliography&oldid=112"