John works for Green Sefton, the Sefton Council service which brings together the Coast & Countryside, Parks & Greenspaces, Flooding & Coastal Erosion, Risk Management and Grounds Maintenance teams for a joined-up approach to the vital management, development and oversight of Sefton’s beautiful coastline, parks and green spaces.

This column looks at the flora, fauna and history of the coastline, and the work that is carried out to protect it.

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Life is all about perspective, and on an ever-changing coastline like Sefton’s, perspective can be gained from a number of expert sources.

Within Green Sefton we are lucky to have the monitoring information drawn together by FCERM – the Flood, Erosion and Coastal Risk Management team, who record the changes along the coast using the latest technology.

The team monitors the coastline from the Solway estuary down to North Wales, reflecting a vital overview of Liverpool Bay and how erosion and accretion shapes it.

On top of regular surveys, once every five years high quality aerial images are taken for FCERM by North West Coastal Monitoring – every bit of the coastline is precisely mapped and captured on film.

This is a part of a national programme funded by DEFRA through the Environment Agency.

High-quality images, taken from a plane, allow careful study of every metre of our coastline from the vast saltmarshes of the Ribble to the shifting sands and channels of Crosby beach.

The changes reflected in the cycle of images are always striking – this is hardly surprising given the powerful forces that have been at work along this coastline for thousands of years.

Things change fast here.

Aerial images I used in the book “Sandscape” published in 2017 (now out of print), where kindly supplied by FCERM, while their latest set of images highlight differences that may not be obvious to the naked eye, but certainly show a change over seven years since the book was published.

The images are a wonderful way of capturing the powerful natural and geomorphological processes that shape this coastline – from accretion between Ainsdale and Southport, to erosion at Formby.

For example, accretion at Ainsdale is part of the natural process of dune formation that has taken place on this coastline for centuries – new dunes can form remarkably quickly.

After all, it wasn’t so long ago that Lord Street in Southport was a dune slack, and high tides were reaching the west end of Nevill Street as recently as the 1900s.

Embryo dunes are not only a vital habitat for many of the rare species that call the Sefton Coast home but may also form a crucial flood defence for the borough in the future.

If undisturbed by severe storm episodes, they can quickly grow, expanding the dune eco-system.

Although a different habitat, the spread of saltmarsh at Southport is influenced by the same processes, while sea level rise, sand extraction in the past, cessation of dredging on the Ribble, run-off from agricultural land and a changing climate may all be contributing factors too.

Saltmarsh is an impressive tool in the struggle that future generations will face against rising sea levels, typically absorbing about 30 per cent of wave energy, and traps carbon in the same way as woodlands.

Healthy, dynamic coastlines change - and have done for thousands of years, the challenge is how we work with them from generation to generation.