Sea Level Rise, CT River Watershed

This dataset is a component of a complete package of products from the Connect the Connecticut project. Connect the Connecticut is a collaborative effort to identify shared priorities for conserving the Connecticut River Watershed for future generations, considering the value of fish and wildlife species and the natural ecosystems they inhabit. Click here to download the full data package, including all documentation.

This dataset represents the sea level rise metric based on a model developed by Rob Theiler and associates at USGS Woods Hole, which is a measure of the probability of a focal cell being unable to adapt to predicted inundation by sea level rise. Specifically, whether a site gets inundated by salt water permanently due to sea level rise or intermittently via storm surges associated with sea level rise clearly determines whether an ecosystem can persist at a site and thus its ability to support a characteristic plant and animal community. USGS examined future sea-level rise impacts on the coastal landscape from Maine to Virginia by producing spatially-explicit, probabilistic predictions using sea-level projections (based on an average of two climate change scenarios: RCP 4.5 and 8.5), vertical land movement (due to glacial isostacy) rates, elevation, and land cover data. The data span the coastal zone from an elevation of 5 m inland to -10 m offshore, and are provided for the forecast year 2080.In the layer provided here, the raw coastal response metric produced by USGS is scaled and inverted so that a cell with high probability of exhibiting a dynamic (or adaptive) response to sea level rise gets a zero (low stress) and a cell with low probability of exhibiting a dynamic response gets a value approaching 1 (high stress). In addition, we set all cells classified as sub-tidal to nodata for consistency with other products. To learn more about USGS’s coastal response model, see Lentz et al. (2015).