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Figure 6. Methodological approach followed to classify the elevation profiles along the Great Britair coastline. The scripts used for the different steps are indicated and included as supplementary information  Figure 6. Methodological approach followed to classify the elevation profiles along the Great Britain  (in the order of millions of transects) to cover the extent of the whole coastline of GB, including the islands, which is 31,368 km, according to Ordnance Survey (OS). To delineate the orthogonal transects, we chose the same approach used in the CliffMetric algorithm proposed by [9], which was specifically designed to resolve coastlines with very irregular shapes such as the GB coastline. As our goal was to assess the likely response of the different elevation transects to a sea-level rise, based uniquely on backshore topographical data, we selected the OS High Water Line as the preferred coastline for generating the orthogonal transects. The CliffMetric code proposed by [9] automatically delineates the coastline for a given still water level but does not allow the user to define a coastline as an input. Our first step was then to modify the CliffMetric code to add the option of a user-defined coastline. This improved version of CliffMetric was then used to extract the elevation profiles from a DTM provided by BlueSky International Limited (5 m resolution) and the most up-to-date available DTM for GB (BlueSky is a commercial product subject to license). The dimensionality of the transects extracted was then reduced using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) [11]. The reduced dimension set of the elevation transects was then clustered using the K-means-partitional clustering approach in MATLAB [12]. We chose a partitional clustering approach over a hierarchical approach due to the large number of transects on the order of 10° that we needed to cluster: the number of distance calculations for hierarchical approaches increases geometrically with the number of observations. [he partitional approach is an iterative process in which experts have to assess the number of clusters and the algorithm iteratively guesses the centroids or central point in each cluster, and assign points to the cluster of their nearest centroid. The sensitivity of the number of clusters and location was tested by using different number of clusters from 5 to 10. We found that ten clusters were the minimum required to separate all types of environments; in particular, we needed to increase from 9 to 10 to be able to separate the low-lying cliff of East England (Cell 3) from the abundant cluster 8. The sensitivity to the seed centroid was tested by running the clustering ten times for Nc = 10, mapping the clusters over aerial photography as shown in Figure 12 and confirming that the regional statistics remained unchanged (i.e., that the top five dominant clusters per region remained dominant).

Figure 6 Methodological approach followed to classify the elevation profiles along the Great Britair coastline. The scripts used for the different steps are indicated and included as supplementary information Figure 6. Methodological approach followed to classify the elevation profiles along the Great Britain (in the order of millions of transects) to cover the extent of the whole coastline of GB, including the islands, which is 31,368 km, according to Ordnance Survey (OS). To delineate the orthogonal transects, we chose the same approach used in the CliffMetric algorithm proposed by [9], which was specifically designed to resolve coastlines with very irregular shapes such as the GB coastline. As our goal was to assess the likely response of the different elevation transects to a sea-level rise, based uniquely on backshore topographical data, we selected the OS High Water Line as the preferred coastline for generating the orthogonal transects. The CliffMetric code proposed by [9] automatically delineates the coastline for a given still water level but does not allow the user to define a coastline as an input. Our first step was then to modify the CliffMetric code to add the option of a user-defined coastline. This improved version of CliffMetric was then used to extract the elevation profiles from a DTM provided by BlueSky International Limited (5 m resolution) and the most up-to-date available DTM for GB (BlueSky is a commercial product subject to license). The dimensionality of the transects extracted was then reduced using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) [11]. The reduced dimension set of the elevation transects was then clustered using the K-means-partitional clustering approach in MATLAB [12]. We chose a partitional clustering approach over a hierarchical approach due to the large number of transects on the order of 10° that we needed to cluster: the number of distance calculations for hierarchical approaches increases geometrically with the number of observations. [he partitional approach is an iterative process in which experts have to assess the number of clusters and the algorithm iteratively guesses the centroids or central point in each cluster, and assign points to the cluster of their nearest centroid. The sensitivity of the number of clusters and location was tested by using different number of clusters from 5 to 10. We found that ten clusters were the minimum required to separate all types of environments; in particular, we needed to increase from 9 to 10 to be able to separate the low-lying cliff of East England (Cell 3) from the abundant cluster 8. The sensitivity to the seed centroid was tested by running the clustering ten times for Nc = 10, mapping the clusters over aerial photography as shown in Figure 12 and confirming that the regional statistics remained unchanged (i.e., that the top five dominant clusters per region remained dominant).