Tracking of Land Reclamation Activities Using Landsat Observations—An Example in Shanghai and Hangzhou Bay

Yuming Shi,Chengquan Huang,Jianya Gong,Shuo Shi

doi:10.3390/rs14030464

Abstract

At present, reclamation—changing ocean areas into inland land cover type for human usage—is one of the major methods for expanding land area around the world to alleviate the problem of land shortage. Thus, reclamation activities play an important role in land area extension. In recent years, reclamation projects have been active in eastern China. However, research on how to determine the initiation of reclamation activity remains very limited. Thus, a method of tracking reclamation activities was proposed in this study to analyze the coastline change due to human activities in Shanghai Lingang New City and Hangzhou Bay area. First, the reclamation area was extracted and separated into sea filling and sea enclosing. Next, the “SEDIMENT” signal track method and the “Eight-Neighborhood” morphological method were used to track dissimilar reclamation types. The historical reclamation activities (including start time and end time) over the recent 30 years were also tracked and obtained. Experimental results indicated that the time tracker accuracy of reclamation activity can reach 83.8%. Thus, this study can provide a reference for tracking coastline change.

Highlights

Land cover composition and change are important factors of ecosystem condition and function [1]
By comparing the classification results of 1988 and 2018, it can be seen that the land area has a large extent filled in the sea area
Comparing the classification results of 1988 and 2018, it can be seen that the land area has a large extent filled in the sea area

Summary

Introduction

Land cover composition and change are important factors of ecosystem condition and function [1]. Coastlines can change dramatically, which greatly affects marine ecology, environmental systems, and economic systems. Many countries such as the Netherlands [4], Japan [5], Korea [6,7], and Indonesia [8], and several megacities such as Mumbai (India), Karachi (Pakistan), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), and Lima (Peru) [9] had reclamation projects in the past to extend the land area for city expansion or agricultural development. To obtain a better understanding of coastline change due to human activities, tracking the historical land reclamation activities is necessary. Historical remote sensing data provide an excellent chance to track the land cover and use change. Human activities can be tracked by remote sensing data

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion