Abstract
Coastal erosion at wave-dominated beaches, primarily driven by nearshore wave dynamics, poses a substantial challenge for coastal management. While existing datasets from individual beaches have improved our understanding of site-specific coastal morphodynamics, there is a growing demand for regional-scale datasets to understand and predict regional shoreline responses to climate variability. To address this, we present a combined shoreline and nearshore wave dataset for the wave-dominated coast of southeast Australia, comprising over 8,000 cross-shore transects at 100 m spacing for over 300 beaches. For each transect, satellite-derived shoreline positions (1984–2024) and beach-face slopes are provided, alongside hourly nearshore wave parameters (1979–2024) extracted at the 10 m depth contour. Shoreline data have been validated using available field surveys, and wave data have been assessed against offshore and nearshore buoy observations. This dataset provides a valuable resource for developing regional-scale understanding of shoreline variability along wave-dominated and embayed coastlines.
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Data availability
The NSW wave and shoreline datasets are publicly available in the Zenodo repository63 under the following link (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17693915).
Code availability
The source code of CoastSat for satellite-derived shoreline and beach slope estimation is available at https://github.com/kvos/CoastSat and archived at a Zenodo repository73 (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2779293). The source code for BinWaves is available at https://github.com/GeoOcean/BlueMath/tree/main. The source code for NSW nearshore wave reconstruction and interpolation is available at https://github.com/yongjingmao/BinWaves_NSW/tree/main. In addition, the offshore CAWCR wave data and the propagation coefficients (Kp) used to transform offshore wave conditions to nearshore grid points are archived at a Zenodo repository74 (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15678828).
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Acknowledgements
Y.M. and K.S. are supported by ARC Future Fellowship FT220100009 and the US Geological Survey Research Co-op (G21AC10672). L.C. acknowledges support from the Government of Cantabria, and the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR under projects Perfect-Storm (2023/TCN/003) and CE4Wind (CPP2022-010118). We thank Brendan Crisp for contributing to the wave data validation. We thank Andy Short for providing the Moruya/Pedro beach profile datasets, and Melissa Bracs, Joshua Simmons, Matthew Philips, Tom Beuzen, and Ed Kearney for contributions of additional profile data. We acknowledge Manly Hydraulics Laboratory (MHL), on behalf of NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW), for access to the offshore buoy records available at https://mhl.nsw.gov.au/Data and NSW DCCEEW for the nearshore buoy records available at https://datasets.seed.nsw.gov.au/dataset/nsw-nearshore-wave-buoy-parameter-time-series-data-completed-deployments. Landsat data were provided by USGS and NASA, and accessed via Google Earth Engine. We also acknowledge CSIRO for access to the CAWCR dataset available at https://data.csiro.au/collection/csiro:39819.
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Y.M. conducted the data validation, wrote the manuscript, and prepared the repository data files. K.S. supervised the data analysis and secured funding. L.C. developed the code for the BinWaves approach. K.V. generated the shoreline dataset. M.H. provided the ground-truth data for shoreline validation. K.S., L.C., K.V., and M.H. contributed to writing the manuscript. V.B. contributed to the wave data validation.
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Mao, Y., Vos, K., Cagigal, L. et al. A Forty-year regional-scale dataset of shoreline change and nearshore wave conditions in Southeast Australia. Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06859-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06859-3

