Programme Background

The Anglian Coastal Monitoring programme (ACM), formerly known as the Anglian "Sea Defence Management Study", was initiated in 1987 and when it started was the first coastal monitoring programme to be operated on a region-wide scale in the UK.

The ACM was always planned to be a continuous and long-running programme; indeed, its greatest value was anticipated after 20 years of continuous monitoring data had been collected, enabling longer term coastal changes to be identified over the whole Anglian Region. This will complement the understanding of short-term or seasonal variations identified during the initial years of the programme.

To date the ACM programme has involved eight phases of activity, yielding some 22 years worth of data. These data have already proved invaluable on numerous flood and erosion risk management activities over this period, from high-level and strategic planning, through coastal and estuarine process studies, to the design and post-project evaluation of schemes.

Table 1 History of the Anglian Coastal Monitoring Programme