CHARTING SEA VISIBILITY ALONG COASTAL AREAS IN THE CONTEXT OF COASTALITY

摘要

As this paper is aligned with an effort to establish a comprehensive approach to coastal areas, one way to put this approach to practice is to base it on some quantifiable indicator. In a recent paper the notion of Coastality has been coined [Kiousopoulos 2008b]. Coastality is a means of quantifying the attractiveness of space with respect to the effect of coastal areas. It refers to both artificial and natural areas, at local level and can be quantified in practical terms. Coastality is measured for both artificial and natural environment. Natural Coastality depends on the physical characteristics of the coastal environment, sea visibility included. Artificial Coastality is an indication of the exploitation of the coastal areas by humans. The present work refers to one of the main components of Natural Coastality, sea visibility, i.e. the view that each location of the terrestrial part of a coastal area has to the sea. Actually, this paper is a case study to prove the usefulness of applying the concept of visibility as part of Coastality in order to quantify the attractiveness of coastal areas. There is also the need to shed some light in some aspects concerning the practical application of the concept of Coastality. The case study refers to a specific local area. However, it is easy to imagine widespread applicability, given the availability of public domain global or near-global datasets, such as the ASTER Global DEM recently published. The use of globally available datasets also contributes to the treatment of the coastal areas without the side-effects imposed by the artificial delineation caused by country borders. This conforms well to the recent European directive INSPIRE [Inspire 2007] calling for common transnational standards with respect to data and metadata.