iBluff: An open-source R package for geomorphic analysis of coastal bluffs/cliffs

Abstract

The R package iBluff is designed for coastal bluffs/bluffs morphological analysis and offers an automatic and reproducible alternative to identify bluff edges using a bare earth digital elevation model (DEM) instead of hand digitizing. This package extracts elevation profiles along automatically identified transects on the bluff-face, bluff top, toe, secondary inflections, relative concavity/convexity of bluff-face, and beach dunes (crests and troughs). The package requires at a minimum a bare earth DEM as a raster and a generalized line shapefile (shoreline) approximately parallel with the bluff-face. Both files should be in the same projected coordinate system. The iBluff package was developed to expand and generalize studies of high-relief coastal areas, investigate erosion and seasonality, and could be extended to use three-dimensional (3D) point-cloud data instead of a DEM.

Keywords

• R
• Coastal
• Bluffs/cliffs
• Morphology