Leveraging your GIS as a Collaborative Platform

Coastal Structures Condition Assessment and Standardized Reporting Application

—Rose Dopsovic, US Army Corps of Engineers

Navigation project maintenance is a continuous process that spans the life of the coastal project. The goal of maintenance is to recognize potential problems and take the appropriate actions to ensure the project continues to function at an acceptable level. The major US Army Corps of Engineer (USACE) District and Division commands have responsibility for establishing periodic inspection procedures, intervals, etc., for civil works projects. However, standardized inspection methodology across all USACE Field Offices is lacking.

With the inclusion of a GIS component to assist in the condition index reporting, data can begin to be gathered, integrated, and managed for comparisons and change assessments in a more standard approach. GIS provides uniform methodology to organize and maintain data for many years through geodatabases and spatial data standards. With standard databases as the foundation, tools and techniques can be deployed across the Corps to aid in standardizing coastal structure condition assessments and results from these assessments. This will make it much easier to compare the condition of a structure on the Pacific coast with a structure on the Atlantic coast.

A key element in a national capability that utilizes standard data formats and supporting analysis tools is standard data about the structures to base analysis on and to support the actual on-site inspection. The National Coastal Mapping Program provides a number of GIS-compatible datasets that allow both the underwater and above-water portions of navigation structures to be analyzed. Using the NCMP data as a foundation, the Coastal Structures Condition Assessment and Standardized Reporting Application (COSCA) was developed to interpret coastal GIS datasets and translate them into a condition for the selected structure.