Fractal analysis of the complexity of United States coastlines

Coastlines have long been used as a principal example of a natural feature that exhibits fractal structure. With the advent of large digitized databases, it has become possible to examine in detail large regions of coast and to examine differences in complexity, as measured by the fractal dimension, among regions. In this study, we have determined the fractal dimension of the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines of the conterminous United States. The traditional divider method was used in obtaining the fractal dimension of each coastline arc from the NOAA Medium-Resolution Shoreline Data Set. On average, the Atlantic coast has much higher fractal dimension than the Pacific coast. The results also indicate that the complexity of the Atlantic coast increases toward low latitudes. These results have implications for the interpretation of species distributions and diversity patterns along the coast and for the understanding of the dynamics of biotic recovery from mass extinctions.