Comprehensive Natural Environment and Landscape Signs in Coastal Settlement Hazard Assessment: Case of East Taiwan between the Coastal Mountain and the Pacific Ocean

Abstract

In East Taiwan, coastal settlements are scattered and narrowly confined between the Coastal Mountain and the Pacific Ocean. These settlements are currently at risk as there is no room for retreat. Therefore, it is essential to conduct a comprehensive and continuous hazard assessment in these coastal residential areas. In order to avoid biased towards the natural environment, the factors that cannot easily be built within the geographic information system (GIS) database are distinguished by Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to conduct a vulnerability assessment of threats to coastal zones. The method: we used the east coast of Taiwan as an example, through GIS and statistical analysis in land-use status, vulnerable population groups and UAV landscape signs of indicators of erosion and accumulation. Through the main output of an intuition scatter map, the erosion landscape susceptibility, economical land-use exposure, and special population groups’ ratio allowed for the easy comparison of the vulnerability, risk level and resilience between different coastal settlements. These diverse observation aspects of risk assessment results can provide prevention and control strategies that meet the different needs of coastal risk management in restricting and strengthening the land-use development of communities.

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