La Selva Beach, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 1.9 miles south of La Selva Beach, CA?
Good news, and an honest one: USGS's data can't distinguish this stretch, 1.9 miles south of La Selva Beach, CA, from a flat trend. Whatever small movement it measured here is statistical noise, not a reliable direction, so none is claimed.
The grain of this number
USGS surveys the coast in transects spaced a few hundred feet apart; this page groups the nearest ones into a single ~3.5-mile reading for the stretch closest to La Selva Beach, CA, rather than showing one arbitrary line. Segment center: 36.90, -121.84. Survey years: 1852-2016, method LRR, from USGS's California shoreline-change assessment. That's how current the data is here, real, but not a live feed, since a shoreline survey is a major undertaking, not an annual check-in.
What backs this reading up
123 transects feed this segment's number; 19% of them individually measured retreat. Uncertainty on this specific number: 0.53 ft/yr either side. The unadjusted figure here, 0.3 ft/yr, would place it 964 of 1211 if ranked directly - but an unreliable rank isn't a useful one, which is exactly why "no significant trend" is the headline instead. Source: USGS National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. Coronado, CA sits at national rank 1147 for growth (1.69 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 394 miles from here. Pajaro Dunes, CA, 2 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, reading slight accretion (beach growing) at 0.45 ft/yr.
Not this whole stretch, just La Selva Beach itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.