Human activities influence coastal environments around the world, primarily via the runoff of sediments and nutrients from land to sea via river systems . Fortunately, as our impacts on coastal oceans have intensified, data related to ocean health has grown in scope, scale, and accessibility to the public. While many methods of evaluating the health of coastal oceans exist, few have explored creating applications that for curious members of the public that may not have extensive modeling experience or resources. To illustrate the utility of data initiatives such as the Living Atlas, this paper presents a spatially explicit model of runoff risk to coastal ecosystems by joining a preexisting ecological framework to public peer reviewed global coastline data. Our results shed light on the challenges and benefits of open access spatial data, simple spatial overlay modeling in GIS, and how these can both allow us to better understand the health of coastal oceans on a global scale.
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