ALERT mobile: Managing coastal archaeological heritage in Western France

Present climatic change and anthropogenic pressure increasingly affect the coastal zone. Hundreds of archaeological sites are currently threatened along the European Atlantic coasts by the accelerated relative rise in sea level, erosion, and various anthropogenic modifications to the environment. Since 2006, the ALERT (Archeologie, Littoral et Rechauffement Terrestre) project has brought together researchers involved in coastal archaeology. This group quickly moved toward developing an interdisciplinary approach aiming at the construction of a vulnerability model for coastal heritage, developing assessment and monitoring maps, and assessing the strategies for research and action adapted to the local and regional scales. As a result of this, a dedicated tool for the vulnerability assessment of coastal archaeological heritage was developed: the Vulnerability Evaluation Form (VEF). Further improvements on the field data collection and on the post-processing procedures have led us to develop the ALERT Mobile App. It allows the user to type and upload all the relevant information contained in the VEF, as well as additional contents, to a secure server. The application, which is ergonomic for mobile use, has been developed thanks to the jQueryMobile framework, compatible with many smartphones and language based on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. The production of dynamic secure web pages, via a dedicated web server, has been programmed in PHP. The display of the interactive maps based on Open Street Map was made using the plugin osmLeaflet.jQuery. There is also a classic web version for administering users and adding administrative information requiring desk based research. ALERT Mobile has drastically reduced the time of data collection in the field, has improved its quality (e.g. providing a greater degree of homogeneity) and