Englewood, FL Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 1.8 miles west of Englewood, FL?
1.8 miles west of Englewood, FL: USGS's transects didn't pick up a trend here that beats the survey's own uncertainty. That's the majority case nationally, and for this stretch specifically it means the coast is holding, not that the data failed to find anything.
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 Englewood, FL. Centered near 26.97°N, 82.38°W. USGS's Gulf of Mexico assessment last surveyed this stretch through 2001, computing the rate with its LRR method. Other US regions were surveyed in different years, sometimes decades apart, so this page states its own rather than implying one national vintage.
What backs this reading up
Averaging 19 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 89% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.55 ft/yr. Taken at face value, this segment's raw -0.15 ft/yr reading would land it 559 of 1211 nationally - a number worth ignoring, since it's statistical noise rather than a real trend. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. For scale: Port St. Joe, FL, 257 miles away, ranks 1067 of 1211 nationally for growth, 0.73 ft/yr. 2 miles up the coast, Manasota Key, FL shows the same lack of a significant trend.
Englewood, FL on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.