I built a tool that lets you type in a Louisiana ZIP code and find out how much erosion risk your area faces, how likely significant land loss is, and roughly how soon. It is free, it runs in your browser, and it is available now at shoresafe.onrender.com. I want to tell you how it works and why I built it.
The Problem It Solves
Louisiana has some of the best coastal erosion data in the world. The USGS has been measuring shoreline change here for decades. NOAA maintains detailed hazard datasets. The Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority tracks land change continuously. The data exists.
What has been harder to find is a way to make that data useful for a regular person who lives on the coast and wants to understand what it means for their neighborhood. Most of the existing tools are designed for researchers and engineers. They are accurate, but they require technical training to interpret, and they tell you about the past rather than predicting the future.
ShoreSafe was built to change that. It takes the scientific data, runs it through a machine-learning model, and returns a plain-language risk assessment for any location in Louisiana.
How It Works
ShoreSafe uses a machine-learning model that I built and coded as part of a joint research project with my partner Dylan Carey. We divided coastal Louisiana into a uniform grid of spatial cells. For each cell, we compiled historical erosion rates from USGS and NOAA shoreline datasets, along with environmental variables: elevation, storm frequency, land cover classification, and shoreline geometry.
We then trained a machine-learning model on that data, comparing it against a historical-average baseline model, which predicts future erosion based solely on past erosion rates. The machine-learning model reduced average prediction error by 60 percent compared to the baseline. It also captures nearly 100 percent of observed erosion within the top 10 percent of highest-risk locations, which means it is reliable where it matters most.
The result is a model that does not just tell you what has happened. It tells you what is likely to happen next.
What You Get When You Use It
Click any point on the map, or enter a ZIP code, and ShoreSafe returns four things: a risk level (high, moderate, or low), a probability estimate for significant erosion, a projected timeline for land loss, and the geographic coordinates of the location.
Coastal marsh areas in southern Louisiana return high probabilities and near-term timelines. Inland areas return low risk and minimal short-term concern. The geographic differentiation reflects what is actually happening: the model is not assigning risk randomly. It is identifying real patterns in the data.
What It Cannot Do
ShoreSafe is a prediction tool, not a real-time monitoring system. It does not track individual storms or update after hurricanes. It reflects patterns in historical data and projects them forward based on environmental conditions. Predictions for individual grid cells carry uncertainty, and the tool is best understood as a risk assessment rather than a precise forecast.
This is a research project I built, presented jointly with Dylan Carey. We are not a company. We are two people from New Orleans who wanted to make something useful out of a problem we care about. The tool will improve over time. Feedback is welcome.
Why This Matters
Coastal resilience planning requires knowing where the risk is. Emergency managers, community organizers, journalists, researchers, homeowners, and anyone else trying to understand the Louisiana coast now has a tool that can give them localized, science-based answers in seconds.
That is what ShoreSafe is for. Not to replace the scientists and engineers who study this coast, but to make what they have learned accessible to everyone who lives on it.
Try it at shoresafe.onrender.com. If you live in coastal Louisiana, look up your ZIP code. And if you have feedback, reach out through the Contact page on this site.