Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia, 140 E. Green St., Athens, GA, 30602, USA.
Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University, 216 West Sibley Hall, Ithaca, NY, 14583, USA.
Sci Rep. 2024 Apr 20;14(1):9114. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-59740-x.
Homeowners in coastal environments often augment their access to estuarine ecosystems by building private docks on their personal property. Despite the commonality of docks, particularly in the Southeastern United States, few works have investigated their historical development, their distribution across the landscape, or the environmental justice dimensions of this distribution. In this study, we used historic aerial photography to track the abundance and size of docks across six South Carolina counties from the 1950s to 2016. Across our roughly 60-year study period, dock abundance grew by two orders of magnitude, mean length of newly constructed docks doubled, and the cumulative length of docks ballooned from 34 to 560 km. Additionally, we drew on census data interpolated into consistent 2010 tract boundaries to analyze the racial and economic distribution of docks in 1994, 1999, 2011, and 2016. Racial composition, measured as the percentage of a tract's population that was White, positively correlated with dock abundance in each year. Median household income and dock abundance were only correlated in 2011. Taken together, these metrics indicate the growing desire for direct estuary access, however, that access does not appear to be equally spread across racial groups. Because docks enhance estuarine access and demarcate private property, our study provides longitudinal insights into environmental justice concerns related to disparate private property ownership. We found a persistent correlation between the racial characteristics of an area and dock abundance, strongly indicating that White South Carolinians have had disproportionately greater private water access for the past two decades.
沿海地区的房主常常通过在个人财产上建造私人码头来增加他们进入河口生态系统的机会。尽管码头很常见，尤其是在美国东南部，但很少有研究调查它们的历史发展、在景观中的分布，或这种分布的环境正义维度。在这项研究中，我们使用历史航空照片来追踪南卡罗来纳州六个县从 20 世纪 50 年代到 2016 年的码头数量和大小。在我们大约 60 年的研究期间，码头的数量增长了两个数量级，新建码头的平均长度增加了一倍，码头的总长度从 34 公里增加到 560 公里。此外，我们利用插值到一致的 2010 年地段边界的人口普查数据，分析了 1994 年、1999 年、2011 年和 2016 年码头在种族和经济方面的分布。以地段人口中白人的百分比来衡量的种族构成，与每年的码头数量呈正相关。中位数家庭收入和码头数量仅在 2011 年相关。总的来说，这些指标表明人们对直接进入河口的渴望越来越大，但这种机会似乎并没有在不同的种族群体中平等分布。由于码头增加了进入河口的机会，并划定了私人财产的界限，我们的研究为与不同的私人财产所有权相关的环境正义问题提供了纵向的见解。我们发现，一个地区的种族特征与码头数量之间存在持续的相关性，这强烈表明，在过去的二十年里，白人南卡罗来纳州人拥有不成比例的更多私人水域使用权。
