Delineated Coastal Cliff Tops Derived from Post-Hurricane Maria Lidar Elevation Data Collected from Puerto Rico: 2018

The National Assessment of Coastal Change Hazards project aims to understand and forecast coastal landscape change. This dataset consists of delineated coastal cliff tops that may be used to assess the hazard posed by eroding coastal cliffs on the islands of Puerto Rico, Culebra, and Vieques. The delineation of cliff tops and toes can be used as an input into cliff hazard metrics and to measure overall cliff changes over time. Cliff tops and cliff toes were identified along three-dimensional (3D) transects using the Cliff Feature Delineation Tool (Seymour and others, 2020), which assigned coordinate locations (X, Y, Z) of cliff features over a 140,244-meter (m) stretch of the Puerto Rican coastline at 10-m intervals and output them as either polyline (cliff transects) or point (cliff top or toe) shapefiles. Feature delineation was performed using post-Hurricane Maria (landfall was September 20, 2017) rasterized topobathy lidar elevation data collected by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Centers for Environmental Information (2018) as bare earth digital elevation model (DEM) files. The delineation tool (Seymour and others, 2020) was used to generate 3D point features in Esri ArcGIS shapefile format representing the cliff tops; these files should be opened in a 3D geographic information system (GIS) viewer.