Abstract
The coastal zone offers among the world’s most productive and valuable ecosystems and is experiencing increasing pressure from anthropogenic impacts: human settlements, agriculture, aquaculture, trade, industrial activities, oil and gas exploitation and tourism. Earth observation has great capability to deliver valuable data at the local, regional and global scales and can support the assessment and monitoring of land- and water-related applications in coastal zones. Compared to optical satellites, cloud-cover does not limit the timeliness of data acquisition with spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors, which have all-weather, day and night capabilities. Hence, active radar systems demonstrate great potential for continuous mapping and monitoring of coastal regions, particularly in cloud-prone tropical and sub-tropical climates. The canopy penetration capability with long radar wavelength enables L-band SAR data to be used for coastal terrestrial environments and has been widely applied and investigated for the following geoscientific topics: mapping and monitoring of flooded vegetation and inundated areas; the retrieval of aboveground biomass; and the estimation of soil moisture. Human activities, global population growth, urban sprawl and climate change-induced impacts are leading to increased pressure on coastal ecosystems causing land degradation, deforestation and land use change. This review presents a comprehensive overview of existing research articles that apply spaceborne L-band SAR data for geoscientific analyses that are relevant for coastal land applications.
Highlights
The coastal zone is a transitional zone between marine and terrestrial ecosystems, and one of the most important regions for human activities
The selection of research articles in this review is based on L-band studies that focus on environmental research in the field of forestry, wetland, and inundation in coastal regions
It must be noted that this review focused primarily on studies utilizing on studies utilizing spaceborne
Summary
The coastal zone is a transitional zone between marine and terrestrial ecosystems, and one of the most important regions for human activities. This zone includes river deltas, coastal plains, estuaries, bays, lagoons, wetlands and mangroves, which offer rich water resources and biodiversity [1,2] and are one of the planet’s most productive and valued ecosystems [3,4]. Coastal regions are used for human settlement, agriculture, aquaculture, trade, industrial activities, and mining and oil and gas exploitation as well as tourism (see Figure 1). 2020, 12, 2228; doi:10.3390/rs12142228 www.mdpi.com/journal/remotesensing population, it can be expected that future development in coastal areas will be heavily threatened if human activities and exploitation will cause suitable habitats and freshwater availability to decline With a growing global population, it can be Remote Sens. 2020, 12, 2228; doi:10.3390/rs12142228 www.mdpi.com/journal/remotesensing population, it can be expected that future development in coastal areas will be heavily threatened if human activities and exploitation will cause suitable habitats and freshwater availability to decline
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