Otvos (2010) expresses some reservations regarding the terminology applied in our recent paper (Pilkey, Cooper, and Lewis, 2009) in which we identify fetch-limited barrier islands (FLBIs) as a previously unrecognized coastal landform, describe their global distribution, and present a geomorphic classification. In our paper, we identified the occurrence of 15,000 islands that occur in fetch-limited environments worldwide and subdivided them into several types (Pilkey, Cooper, and Lewis, 2009, Tables 2 and 5), recognizing a variety of mechanisms of formation and evolution and thereby providing a useful basis for their future study. Globally, there are many types of open-ocean barrier islands (Pilkey, 2003; Stutz and Pilkey, in press), just as there are many types of fetch-limited barrier islands (Cooper, Pilkey, and Lewis, 2007a, 2007b; Lewis, Cooper, and Pilkey, 2005; Pilkey, Cooper, and Lewis, 2009).
Otvos (2010) contends that some...
