Gaining insight into regional coastal changes on La Réunion island through a Bayesian data mining approach

Thomas Bulteau (1) , Audrey Baills (1) , Lise Petitjean (1, 2) , Manuel Garcin (1) , Hindumathi Palanisamy (3) , Gonéri Le Cozannet (1)

1 BRGM - Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières (BRGM)
2 LMD - Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (UMR 8539)
3 LEGOS - Laboratoire d'études en Géophysique et océanographie spatiales

Recent works have highlighted the interest in coastal geographical databases - collected for coastal management purposes - for obtaining insight into current shoreline changes. On La Réunion, a tropical volcanic high island located in the Southern Indian Ocean, a dataset is available which describes shoreline changes, the coastal geomorphology and the presence of anthropic structures. This database is first supplemented with information on the exposure of each coastal segment to energetic waves and to estuarine sediment inputs. To incorporate relative sea-level changes along the coast in the database, levelling data are analysed in combination with GPS, satellite altimetry and sea-level reconstructions. Finally, a method based on Bayesian networks is used to assess the probabilistic relationships between the variables in the database. The results highlight the high degree of dependency between variables: a retrospective model is able to reproduce 81% of the observations of shoreline mobility. Importantly, we report coastal ground motions for La Réunion island of the order of 1 to 2 mm/year along the coast. However, the resulting differing rates of relative sea-level rise do not significantly impact on shoreline changes. Instead, the results suggest a major control of geological processes and local coastal geomorphic settings on shoreline evolution. While any exploration of a coastal database needs to be complemented with human reasoning to interpret the results in terms of physical processes, this study highlights the significance of revisiting other datasets to gain insight into coastal processes and factors causing shoreline changes, including sea-level changes.

Mots clés: Shoreline changes; Bayesian networks; Sea-level rise; Vertical ground motions; Coastal databases; La Réunion island

Domaines: Sciences de la Terre; Calcul [stat.CO]

Thomas Bulteau, Audrey Baills, Lise Petitjean, Manuel Garcin, Hindumathi Palanisamy, et al.. Gaining insight into regional coastal changes on La Réunion island through a Bayesian data mining approach. Geomorphology, 2015, 228, pp.134-146. ⟨10.1016/j.geomorph.2014.09.002⟩. ⟨hal-01066886⟩