Abstract
Coastal erosion impacts the life of the fishermen community. India’s southern state, Kerala has a coastline that runs around 580 km along the regions with high population density. This region is having an important role in the fishing industry and tourism of the state. Kerala’s coastal landforms are having noticeable changes due to marine and climate change impacts. Anthropogenic activities such as sand mining also affect this region adversely. Alappad panchayath in the coastal village of the Kollam district in Kerala, is a narrow strip of land situated between the Arabian Sea and the Thiruvananthapuram-Shoranur (TS) canal. This region is rich in heavy minerals which attracts sand mining along the coast. In this article, a detailed examination of these changes and causes has been carried out using Geographic Information System (GIS) and remote sensing techniques. The major goal of this study aims to assess the shoreline changes for 20 years where most of the mining activities happen. We used Landsat 7 ETM+ C1 Level 1 image for the study area with an interval of 5 years. We extracted the shoreline changes that happened during a span of 20 years in the region of Alappad by applying the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) and shoreline delineation techniques using Environment for Visualizing Images (ENVI) and ArcGIS Pro software. It has been observed that every 5 years a significant amount of land is reduced.
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