EFFECTS OF BEACH NOURISHMENT ON THE NEARSHORE 

 ENVIRONMENT IN LAKE HURON AT LEXINGTON HARBOR (MICHIGAN) 



by 



Robert T. Nester 



and 



Thomas P. Poe 



I. INTRODUCTION 



The U.S. Array Corps of Engineers conducted a beach nourishment project at 

 the Lexington Harbor at Lexington, Michigan, on the southwest shore of Lake 

 Huron in October 1980 (Fig. 1). The project was designed to mitigate shoreline 

 erosion attributable to the installation of the harbor which interrupted the 

 littoral drift of beach sediments and accelerated erosion of the shoreline 

 south of the harbor. Nourishment was accomplished by establishing a feeder 

 beach on the lake foreshore immediately south of the harbor in the area of 

 heaviest erosion. About 54,000 cubic meters of sediment was deposited to 

 create the feeder beach. About 19,000 cubic meters of this sediment was 

 dredged from an accretion area at the shoreward end at the harbor's north 

 breakwater and pxomped to the beach; the remainder was obtained from a nearby 

 commercial borrow site on land and trucked to the beach. In response to a 

 request from the U.S. Army Coastal Engineering Research Center (CERC) , the U.S. 

 Fish and Wildlife Service's Great Lakes Fishery Laboratory conducted a study to 

 determine the effect of the beach nourishment activities on the nearshore 

 aquatic environment in the vicinity of the harbor. Although the effects of 

 beach nourishment activities on the ecology of marine coastal areas have 

 received considerable attention in recent years (Cronin, Gunter, and Hopkins, 

 1971; Courtenay, et al. , 1974; Parr, Diener, and Lacy, 1978; Marsh, et al., 

 1978, 1980; Culter and Mahadevan, 1982), the present report represents the 

 first effort to identify and evaluate such effects in a Great Lakes coastal 

 area. 



II. METHODS AND MATERIALS 



1. Beach Face Profile. 



A number of aerial photographs were taken throughout the study area, and 

 in particular in the Corps' beach nourishment project area immediately adjacent 

 to the harbor, to describe the beach face profile. Figure 1 is an oblique view 

 of the harbor on 3 December 1980 from an altitude of about 450 meters. Figure 

 2 is an overlapping series of aerial photographs taken of the shoreline of the 

 entire study area on 16 June 1980 from an altitude of about 1,800 meters. This 

 figure shows both the location of the transects with sampling stations and the 

 beach face profile of the study area. Figures 3, 4, and 5 are aerial photo- 

 graphs taken of the harbor area on 1 6 June 1980, 3 December 1980, and 6 

 December 1981 from an altitude of about 450 meters showing changes in the beach 

 face profile in the area where the nourishment activity occurred. 



