Gaining insight into regional coastal changes on La Réunion island through a Bayesian data mining approach

Recent works have highlighted the interest in coastal geographical databases – collected for coastal management purposes – for obtaining insight into current shoreline changes. On La Réunion, a tropical volcanic high island located in the Southern Indian Ocean, a dataset is available which describes shoreline changes, the coastal geomorphology and the presence of anthropic structures. This database is first supplemented with information on the exposure of each coastal segment to energetic waves and to estuarine sediment inputs. To incorporate relative sea-level changes along the coast in the database, levelling data are analysed in combination with GPS, satellite altimetry and sea-level reconstructions. Finally, a method based on Bayesian networks is used to assess the probabilistic relationships between the variables in the database. The results highlight the high degree of dependency between variables: a retrospective model is able to reproduce 81% of the observations of shoreline mobility. Importantly, we report coastal ground motions for La Réunion island of the order of 1 to 2mm/year along the coast. However, the resulting differing rates of relative sea-level rise do not significantly impact on shoreline changes. Instead, the results suggest a major control of geological processes and local coastal geomorphic settings on shoreline evolution. While any exploration of a coastal database needs to be complemented with human reasoning to interpret the results in terms of physical processes, this study highlights the significance of revisiting other datasets to gain insight into coastal processes and factors causing shoreline changes, including sea-level changes. •A coastal database for La Réunion island is explored using Bayesian networks.•Statistical dependencies among coastal variables in the database are analysed.•Relative sea-level rise along the coast of La Réunion is not homogeneous.•Shoreline changes are not significantly affected by different SLR rates here.•Coastal evolution remains largely controlled by other geological processes.