Citizen Science Coastal Monitoring in Poland: Building Long-Term Shoreline Records

The monitoring context in Poland

Coastal monitoring in Poland is primarily the responsibility of the State Hydrological and Meteorological Institute (IMGW-PIB) and regional Maritime Offices (Urzędy Morskie). Survey transects are spaced at intervals of roughly 500 metres to 1 kilometre along erosion-prone sections, with measurements typically taken annually or following major storm events.

The Polish coast spans approximately 770 kilometres. Given this length, and the fact that erosion can occur between formal transects as well as at them, there are inevitably sections where change is not directly observed by any institutional measurement. Additionally, rapid post-storm events — collapses that occur within hours of peak wave activity — may not be captured if the next survey visit is weeks later.

What citizen observers can contribute

Volunteers living near or frequently visiting coastal sections can contribute several categories of observation:

• Event documentation — photographs and written notes made shortly after storm events, capturing the immediate state of the cliff edge before natural stabilisation begins.
• Repeated position records — GPS waypoints or photographs from fixed reference positions, taken monthly or seasonally, building a time series at locations not covered by formal transects.
• Object displacement records — tracking of fixed objects such as fenceposts, bollards or vegetation that sits near the cliff edge, noting when they shift or disappear.
• Storm-water observations — notes on wave run-up extent and debris deposition that indicate the intensity of individual events.

Data quality and consistency

The scientific value of citizen observations depends heavily on consistency. A single photograph taken once does not provide a useful baseline. The same viewpoint visited twelve times over twelve months — with noted coordinates, date, time and camera orientation — provides a record that can be analysed.

Researchers working with citizen-contributed coastal data recommend that volunteers document their methodology as explicitly as possible: where they stood, what device they used, the direction they faced and any relevant conditions such as recent rainfall or elevated water levels. This metadata allows later users of the data to assess its reliability and account for variation between observers.

Standardisation challenges

Unlike birdwatching or species observation programmes, coastal erosion monitoring lacks a widely adopted volunteer protocol in Poland. There is no national citizen-science portal for shoreline observation comparable to those in the United Kingdom (the Channel Coastal Observatory is a professional analogue) or the United States. Individual volunteers and local groups therefore develop their own procedures, making data comparison across sites difficult.

Links to institutional science

In several documented cases internationally, citizen observation data has been used in peer-reviewed coastal science. The Baltic coast offers context for this type of engagement: IO PAN in Sopot has a long research tradition in Baltic oceanography and coastal dynamics. Academic papers based on Baltic coast erosion have appeared in journals including Oceanologia, Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science and Baltic Coastal Zone.

Citizen-contributed data is most useful to researchers when it is linked to known spatial coordinates and includes the date and observer notes. Data shared with local maritime offices or university departments also increases the chance that it will be incorporated into larger monitoring efforts.

Local example: the Rewal coast

The stretch of coast between Trzęsacz and Rewal in West Pomeranian Voivodeship is one of the most documented erosion zones on the Polish coast, partly due to the visibility of the Trzęsacz church ruins and partly because the area is a tourist destination with many repeat visitors. Seasonal photographs of the cliff face at Trzęsacz accumulated over years by visitors constitute an informal multi-year archive of cliff-edge position, even though the photographs were not collected with that purpose in mind.

This illustrates both the potential and the limitation of incidental citizen observation: the data exists but is distributed across private photograph archives and social media, making systematic analysis difficult without coordination.

What structured coordination would require

A functional citizen monitoring network for Polish coastal erosion would need a defined set of fixed observation stations, a data submission format agreed with an institutional partner, and a procedure for archiving and validating submissions. These elements are not complex in principle, but they require sustained organisational effort. Regional environmental NGOs, university coastal departments and local maritime offices are the natural institutional partners for such an effort.

Until a formal structure exists, individual observers who document their methods carefully and share data with researchers contribute to the field in a meaningful if limited way.