Toward a Global Classification of Coastal Anthromes

Abstract

Given incontrovertible evidence that humans are the most powerful agents of environmental change on the planet, research has begun to acknowledge and integrate human presence and activity into updated descriptions of the world's biomes as "anthromes". Thus far, a classification system for anthromes is limited to the terrestrial biosphere. Here, I present a case for the consideration and validity of coastal anthromes. Every coastal environment on Earth is subject to direct and indirect human modification and disturbance. Despite the legacy, ubiquity, and pervasiveness of human interactions with coastal ecosystems, coastal anthromes still lack formal definition. Following the original argument and framework for terrestrial anthromes, I outline a set of coastal anthrome classifications that dovetail with terrestrial and marine counterparts. Recognising coastal environments as complex and increasingly vulnerable anthropogenic systems is a fundamental step toward understanding their modern dynamics-and, by extension, realising opportunities for and limits to their resilience.

Masked Shoreline Erosion at Large Spatial Scales as a Collective Effect of Beach Nourishment

“…More broadly, if the quantity of beach nourishment in recent decades has been sufficient to mask true rates of shoreline erosion along the U.S. Atlantic Coast and "override the geomorphological signal of shoreline behavior" (Hapke et al, 2013), then our results point to the emergence of a system trap (Lazarus, 2017;Meadows & Wright, 2008). An "addiction" system trap may develop when an intervention to a problem obscures the true system state without addressing the underlying cause (Meadows & Wright, 2008).…”

Defining Coastal Resilience

“…In objective, dynamical terms, a system with more than one stable state may be resilient to perturbations in whichever state it takes. What is not always explicit is a collective preference among those who use and manage a given environmental system for the persistence of one state over any others [1,107]. If coastal resilience is an intrinsic property that arises from the natural ability of coastal systems to adapt to sudden or gradual changes to the drivers of coastal dynamics [101], then the Building with Nature concept [3], for example, represents a deliberate effort to embed these dynamics into management approaches that facilitate resilience in developed and populated coastal zones.…”

“…If coastal resilience is an intrinsic property that arises from the natural ability of coastal systems to adapt to sudden or gradual changes to the drivers of coastal dynamics [101], then the Building with Nature concept [3], for example, represents a deliberate effort to embed these dynamics into management approaches that facilitate resilience in developed and populated coastal zones. This inevitable blurring of natural and built environments-or the outright replacement of natural environments with built ones [1,108]-thus complicates any unified definition of resilience.…”

“…A powerful concept in terrestrial ecology is that the biomes of the world-traditionally defined as natural ecological systems with human systems embedded in them-have changed so fundamentally with human domination of the world's ecosystems [110,111] that they are now anthromes, or human systems with ecological systems embedded in them [108,112]. Invoking global analyses of human impacts on marine and coastal environments by Halpern et al [113,114], Lazarus [1] has argued that developed coastal environments are so impacted (directly and indirectly) by human activities, from engineering and industry to climate-related change, that the world's coasts now constitute coastal anthromes.…”

“…Coastal environments are among the most intensively used regions of the Earth for supporting human population, activity, and industry [1]. Because this intensive use tends to come at the expense of natural coastal environmental systems, driving ecological and landscape degradation or destruction, the challenge for coastal management is to sustainably balance the fundamental functional needs of human and natural coastal systems for the present and future.…”