Remote Detection of Shoreline Changes in Eastern Bank of Laizhou Bay, North China

Sandy beaches of the eastern coast zone in Eastern Laizhou Bay represent the most popular tourist, recreational destinations and constitute some of the most valuable restates in China. This paper presents the detection of shoreline changes in Laizhou Bay East Bank using an automatic histogram thresholding algorithm on the basis of multi-temporal Landsat images. Shoreline change rates (SCR) and shoreline change areas (SCA) were retrieved using the statistical approach and zonal change detection method, respectively. Results showed that during 1979–2010 a large portion (over 59.8 %) of shoreline are dominated by a retreating process with an average rate of −2.01 m/year, while other parts of shoreline exhibited a seaward advancing trend due to intense land reclamation activities. It is our anticipation that the result of this work would support sandy beaches protection and management in China coast.