Congrats to Nicolas Pucino on the fantastic paper in Nature's Scientific Reports!

Our group member Nicolas Pucino just published part of his research in Scientific Reports. The paper is entitled: " Citizen science for monitoring seasonal-scale beach erosion and behaviour with aerial drones".

Pucino et al., 2021

In this study, the research team demonstrates a novel approach combining citizen science with low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles that reliably produces survey-grade morphological data able to model sediment dynamics from event to annual scales. The high-energy wave-dominated coast of south-eastern Australia, in Victoria, is used as an ideal natural laboratory to examine the reliability of the protocol and develop a set of indices to study multi-scale erosional dynamics.

They found that citizen scientists provide unbiased data as accurate as professional researchers. They distinguished between slowed and accelerated erosional modes for the beach changes. The results show that open-ocean beaches mobilise three times as much sediment as embayed beaches.

This citizen science protocol presented in the publication provides high quality monitoring capabilities, which although subject to important legislative preconditions, it is applicable in other parts of the world and transferable to other landscape systems where the understanding of sediment dynamics is critical for management of natural or anthropogenic processes.

This project is funded by the State of Victoria Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP) under the Victorian Coastal Monitoring Program, Deakin University and The University of Melbourne. Apollo Bay nourishment data has been provided by Hannah Fallon (DELWP).

The authors of the paper also include the group members Rafael C. Carvalho, Blake Allan and Daniel Ierodiaconou. Congrats to all!

To read the open access full article, click here.