Abstract
The rapid advance of remote sensing technology during the last few decades provides a new opportunity for measuring detectable estuarine spatial change. Although estuarine surface area and convergence are important hydraulic parameters often used to predict long-term estuarine evolution, the majority of automated analyses of channel plan view dynamics have been specifically written for riverine systems and have limited applicability to most of the estuaries in the world. This study presents MorphEst, a MATLAB-based collection of analysis tools that automatically measure estuarine planform geometry. MorphEst uses channel masks to extract estuarine length, convergence length, estuarine shape, and areal gain and loss of estuarine surface area due to natural or human factors. Comparisons indicated that MorphEst estimates closely matched with independent measurements of estuarine surface area (r = 0.99) and channel width (r = 0.92) of 39 estuaries along the South Korean coast. Overall, this toolbox will help to improve the ability to solve research questions commonly associated with estuarine evolution as it introduces a tool to automatically measure planform geometric features from remotely sensed imagery.
Highlights
IntroductionEstuaries exhibit a wide range of human impacts as many of the world’s ports and cities are located in close proximity to an estuary [1,2]
Inconsistencies between the two approaches were mainly from the inaccurate manual measurement of the centerline and estuarine length using the ArcGIS-based approach. These results suggest that MorphEst-generated area measurements agree well with manual estimates
This study presents MorphEst, the first toolbox that automatically measures estuarine planform geometry including estuarine length, estuarine convergence length, shape, and estuarine surface area change due to natural or human factors
Summary
Estuaries exhibit a wide range of human impacts as many of the world’s ports and cities are located in close proximity to an estuary [1,2]. Large engineering projects such as industrial and urban development of estuaries have led to severe degradation of ecosystems [3,4], and changes to shoreline location, river discharge, tidal characteristics, as well as sediment dynamics throughout the last century [5,6,7,8,9]. As sea level is predicted to rise between 0.3 and 1.0 m within the century [11]
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