Sanibel, FL Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 2.6 miles west of Sanibel, FL
The coast 2.6 miles west of Sanibel, FL is actually gaining ground, not losing it: USGS's transects measure 2.71 feet of accretion a year here, sediment building up rather than washing away. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 27.1 feet over the last decade.
What this reading actually covers
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Sanibel, FL into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 26.46°N, 82.15°W. The survey behind it runs to 2001, in USGS's Gulf of Mexico 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 2.71 ft/yr accretion rate 2.6 miles west of Sanibel, FL for 25 years would add roughly 68 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
What backs this reading up
102 transects feed this segment's number; 21% of them individually measured retreat. USGS's confidence interval here is ±1.58 ft/yr. Sorted from fastest erosion to fastest growth across all 1211 measured segments nationally, this one lands at 1176. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. Rank 1158 nationally for growth belongs to Coronado, CA, 2140 miles from this stretch, measured at 2.04 ft/yr, 0.8x this stretch's rate. 2 miles up the coast, Captiva, FL shows 2.34 ft/yr of eroding.
One address near Sanibel: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.