Abstract
In recent years, satellite imagery has shown its potential to support the sustainable management of land, water, and natural resources. In particular, it can provide key information about the properties and behavior of sandy beaches and the surrounding vegetation, improving the ecomorphological understanding and modeling of coastal dynamics. Although satellite image processing usually demands high memory and computational resources, free online platforms such as Google Earth Engine (GEE) have recently enabled their users to leverage cloud-based tools and handle big satellite data. In this technical note, we describe an algorithm to classify the coastal land cover and retrieve relevant information from Sentinel-2 and Landsat image collections at specific times or in a multitemporal way: the extent of the beach and vegetation strips, the statistics of the grass cover, and the position of the shoreline and the vegetation–sand interface. Furthermore, we validate the algorithm through both quantitative and qualitative methods, demonstrating the goodness of the derived classification (accuracy of approximately 90%) and showing some examples about the use of the algorithm’s output to study coastal physical and ecological dynamics. Finally, we discuss the algorithm’s limitations and potentialities in light of its scaling for global analyses.
Highlights
Coastal zones around the world have historically attracted humans and human activities, which have led to heavily populated coastal areas [1,2,3]
In all the tested cases, the mean and standard deviation of the accuracy reaches a constant value when each class has at least 700 points, which is much less than the number of the labeled datasets (Section 2.1)
Satellite image processing can support the monitoring of the spatio-temporal evolution of transitional boundaries, such as the shoreline and the sand
Summary
Coastal zones around the world have historically attracted humans and human activities, which have led to heavily populated coastal areas [1,2,3]. Rising sea levels and the increase in episodic events due to climate change threaten the coastal ecosystems and their inhabitants. Sustainable management of the coastal zones demands a thorough understanding of the coastal processes at multiple scales, such as the local feedback between beach erosion and accretion and the associated vegetation adjustment, the continental shoreline advancement and retreat, and the macro-scale greening or desertification of coastal regions. This knowledge is urgently needed to deal with climate change, forecast the potential response of coastal systems to varying environmental conditions, and delineate adaptation strategies. Since the evolution of the coastal systems, here intended as the ensemble of beach and the landward ecological sequence of coastal vegetation, results from the continuous interaction between abiotic and biotic factors, system understanding must be based on geological, physical, and ecological knowledge
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
