Dover Beaches South, NJ Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 0.3 miles south of Dover Beaches South, NJ
Unusual good news for this stretch: the shoreline 0.3 miles south of Dover Beaches South, NJ has grown by a measured 0.4 feet a year on average, per USGS's long-term transect data for this section. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 4 feet over the last decade.
What this reading actually covers
This is a roughly 3.5-mile stretch of coast, not one address or parcel - USGS's own transects run every few hundred feet, but that's finer than any one property needs, so this page reports the stretch nearest Dover Beaches South, NJ. Centered near 39.95°N, 74.08°W. The survey behind it runs to 2007-2009, in USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic assessment, using the LRR method. Shoreline surveys aren't repeated every year, so this is the most recent long-term measurement USGS has published for this coast, not a live reading.
25 years at this rate
Holding the 0.4 ft/yr accretion rate 0.3 miles south of Dover Beaches South, NJ for 25 years would add roughly 10 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
What backs this reading up
Averaging 106 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 0% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.28 ft/yr. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 994 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. Inwood, NY sits at national rank 1043 for growth (0.59 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 45 miles from here. Lavallette, NJ, 2.1 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, itself no significant trend.
Not this whole stretch, just Dover Beaches South itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.