A project based on the richness of satellite imagery
for one of the greatest global concerns:
the erosion of our coastlines.
General presentation
The Space for Shore consortium led by french SME i-Sea and involving partners all around Europe in 5 countries where coastal erosion is a critical issue has been working for 2 years to prototype the most relevant Earth-Observation products to support coastal erosion assessment and monitoring.
From the start, this ESA-funded project (EOEP-5 program) had the ambition to get the most from historical and current EO data (in particular Copernicus Sentinel-1/2) over the last 25 years by showcasing how Earth Observation can provide information all along european coastal areas. To do so, the Space for Shore unique guideline had been to target the extraction of all key coastal erosion indicators seeking for exhaustivity and relevance within the range of EO data and methods that may bring added value for the assessment of shoreline change and coastal erosion at both local and large scales.
The set of countries and pilot regions has been selected in the light of their representativeness with regards to the variety of european coastlines, i.e depending on their geomorphological setting and degree of exposure to wave and tide forcings which pre-determine together the type of coastal erosion proxies (picture below) required by european coastal managers. These products which are then presented are to be used for knowledge augmentation of coastal erosion processes and for decision support in beach and shoreline planning.
Objectives
- Consolidate end user requirements: Carry out interviews with end-users involved to collect the needs in terms of morphological indicators to monitor, the time period, the temporal frequency, and all requirements necessary to build the production roadmap and develop the corresponding algorithms.
- Define the satellite product technical specifications: Develop, adapt, combine, and use algorithms to conducts tests on pilot coastal areas for erosion monitoring over various types of littorals.
- Provide a Proof of Concept experimental work: Experimental work on a set of limited areas and some dates.
- Plan the validation framework and collect in-situ data.
- Large-scale demonstration over nearly 1500 km of coastline selected as pilot areas: For each area of interest, the indicators identified were produced, carefully addressing the specifications detailed by the final end–users. The demonstration focuced on three aspects:
- The extraction of the relevant indicator,
- The extraction of relevant indicators over large areas,
- The extraction of relevant indicators over long time periods exploiting historical satellite datasets.
Our demonstration were therefore fully representative, in terms of geographical and temporal coverage, of major threats and monitoring solutions identified in Europe as relevant by national to regional final–end–users.
- When needed, new methods were developed to address indicators relevant that are neither described in the literature, nor existing in the toolboxes of the projects’ partners.
Following the excellent results obtained by the Space for Shore consortium characterizing the coastal erosion over Five ESA Member States (France, Germany, Greece, Portugal and Romania), the European Space Agency (ESA) decided to extend the project to achieve three main objectives:
- Extend the coverage (minimum 300 km) over the past 25 years for the Countries already engaged.
- Extend the key coastal state indicators products to Svalbard (minimum 300 km over the past 30 years).
- Update the delivered key coastal state indicators products to the present.