User-generated Content in Smart Coastal Planning: 4 Strategies for Implementation

September 8, 2025

Our coasts are changing fast — under pressure from climate change, tourism, and urban growth. Coastal futures aren’t shaped by satellites alone. In this article, Adriana Fernandes (ENIDH) shows how everyday photos and posts can power smarter, more human coastal planning.

Why user-generated content matters in smart coastal planning?

4 strategies for implementation

What can we learn about the future of our coasts from the photos, comments, and opinions people share daily on social media?

At first glance, such posts may seem irrelevant to planning. Yet User-Generated Content (UGC) — from georeferenced beach photos and reviews on travel platforms to behavioural trends on social networks — offers rich, informal data revealing how citizens experience and use coastal spaces.

With climate change intensifying, tourism expanding, and pressure on the shoreline increasing, ignoring these insights means overlooking a live, real-time source of information. UGC should be integrated into tools such as digital twins, planning dashboards, and participatory platforms, recognising that valuable data come not only from satellites and sensors, but also from lived human experience.

Planning Without the Human Voice

Coastal planning has long relied on technical data: satellite imagery, environmental sensors, and geophysical surveys. While essential, these sources exclude the everyday perspectives of those who live, work, or visit the coast. The result is technically robust but socially disconnected (Martínez-Ruiz et al., 2021).

Moreover, the U.S. Geological Survey (2023) found that local managers struggle to apply available data due to complex digital tools and low public engagement. The gap between science and community experience remains wide.

User-generated content (UGC) offers a bridge: capturing spontaneous perceptions of coastal use, pressures, and conflicts. Studies such as Ghermandi (2023) show that UGC can map usage patterns and detect problems faster than traditional monitoring alone.

The Value of Informal Data

Social media data provide unique insights into human behaviour and environmental perceptions, with strong relevance for sustainability (Ghermandi, 2023).

For instance, Murphy et al. (2021) examined tweets on Florida’s red tides, finding that post volumes matched the presence of toxins, fish kills, and respiratory complaints — proving that social media can act as a near real-time environmental alert system.

Similarly, Jeong et al. (2021) analysed Flickr and Twitter data to map tourist hotspots in South Korea, finding strong correlation with official visitation statistics and highlighting lesser-known locations.

Together, these examples confirm that what was once dismissed as “digital noise” can be transformed into operational intelligence — provided it is filtered, validated, and integrated with other data sources.

Case Studies

Some initiatives already use citizen input in coastal monitoring. Australia’s CoastSnap enables beachgoers to photograph fixed viewpoints and share them online, producing image series that track shoreline change with near-scientific precision (Harley et al., 2019).

In Europe, projects described by Martínez-Ruiz et al. (2021) gather local perceptions on tourism and conservation via participatory platforms, integrating them into GIS systems. The result: richer analyses combining institutional and community knowledge.

These cases show that UGC does not replace scientific data — it amplifies it, adding human context, validating hypotheses, and revealing early-warning signals.

From UGC to Actionable Knowledge

To make User-generated content (UGC) central to smart coastal planning, four strategies stand out (Jeong et al., 2021; Harley et al., 2019; Ghermandi, 2023; Martínez-Ruiz et al., 2021):

1. Integrate into coastal digital twins.

Use georeferenced, anonymised, and validated UGC to feed virtual models that simulate both physical changes and community experiences.

2. Develop interactive dashboards.

Create platforms that combine official data with public input — accessible to both experts and citizens — to strengthen transparency and support dialogue.

3. Enforce ethical and diverse sourcing.

Apply curation protocols that reduce technological and cultural bias, protect privacy, and ensure geographic and social representativeness.

4. Build user capacity.

Train decision-makers to interpret and apply UGC critically, ensuring that platforms drive informed action rather than serving purely as visual tools.

With these measures, UGC can shift from scattered online traces to a structured, strategic resource for real-time, inclusive decision-making.

Risks and Trade-offs

User-generated content (UCG) integration brings benefits but also challenges: under-representation of less digitalised communities, privacy concerns requiring informed consent, and variable data quality.

The solution is combining automated filtering, human review, and triangulation with scientific and administrative data — the latter meaning official records such as land registries, tourism statistics, zoning plans, or environmental reports. This keeps UGC as a complementary layer, enriching but not replacing traditional monitoring.

Remaining with the current purely technical approach risks slower, less responsive, and socially disconnected coastal policies is a risk we can no longer afford.

Conclusion

Incorporating online contributions into digital twins and participatory dashboards are a quiet revolution in coastal planning that will make it more human, agile, and inclusive. Evidence shows UGC can help identify environmental issues, track tourism flows, and enhance decision models but only with ethics, representativeness, and technical rigour.

Coastal spaces belong to all, yet decisions are too often made in closed technical circles. In this context digital voices can represent useful tools in detecting risks earlier, anticipating conflicts, and adapting policies to realities that shift in weeks, not decades. As environmental and social changes accelerate, UGC integration represent a great opportunity to keep coastal planning responsive and relevant.