Coastal environmental monitoring using GIS technology

Outlines issues of managing coastal environmental information and suggests ways that technology addresses these issues. In particular, the marine environment's temporality and multidimensionality cause problems for geographic information systems designed to emulate the map. Systems that provide a richer descriptive environment offer new hope, since they permit numerical modeling of entities and their interrelationships. Such methods are useful to describe motion, cycles, fluid dynamics, and change in the coastal region.<>