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NOAA's Heritage Success Stories
NOAA Helps Massachusetts Peer into the State's Coastal Past
A western view of Fairhaven, Massachusetts as seen from New Bedford. In: Historical Collections ... of Every Town in Massachusetts. 1841. |
Since 2002, the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management (CZM) in conjunction with the BSC Group, Inc., an interdisciplinary group of land surveyors, civil engineers, and environmental planners located in Norwell, Mass., has been working on a project to map areas of state tidelands jurisdiction. The extent and location of jurisdiction has a significant impact on the public's ability to access, use and enjoy the waterfront. Traditionally, tidelands jurisdictional determinations have been based on a project-by-project evaluation of historical high and low water line locations, a process that can be time consuming and often geographically inconsistent. The scope of the project covers virtually the entire Massachusetts coast; and, for those geographic areas that are located on filled tidelands, a key focus of this work included the determination of the location of historic high and low water lines.
The necessity to acquire reliable historical shoreline maps proved to be a fundamental requirement for the project. Fortunately, CZM discovered that the NOAA Central Library possessed high quality diapositives of all Massachusetts Topographic (T-) and Hydrographic (H-) sheets produced by the U.S. Coast Survey, NOAA's oldest ancestor agency, as well as compilations of geodetically determined geographical positions that were used to control the early mapping efforts. Diapositives were scanned at high resolution and the geographic information used to transform early mapping datums to the contemporary datum. This allowed CZM to produce 160-year-old base maps of the entire Massachusetts coastline that facilitated the evaluation of pre-Coast Survey maps and comparisons to modern maps. While producing this historical seamless view of the Massachusetts coastline, it was found that the original survey sheets were surveyed at the highest possible accuracy, allowing the use of the resulting products not only as the basis for many jurisdictional determinations, but of equal importance, for the study of cultural resources and the natural and anthropomorphic evolution of the modern-day Massachusetts coastline.
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