Pacific Rim Shoreline Change Time-Series from Landsat Imagery, 1984-2022

Pacific Rim wave-dominated sandy coasts, including those in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Chile, Peru, Mexico, and the USA, are covered. The dataset contains 40 years of tidally-corrected shoreline change data derived from Landsat 5, 7, and 8 imagery, covering over 3,000 beaches and 100,000 cross-shore transects. It was created by Kilian Vos of UNSW Sydney to investigate the impact of El Niño/Southern Oscillation on coastal erosion and accretion.

Use Cases

• Modeling beach erosion and accretion patterns based on 40-year shoreline change time-series.
• Investigating correlations between ENSO cycles and coastal change using tidally-corrected data.
• Mapping regional shoreline trends across the Pacific basin using data from over 3,000 beaches.
• Validating satellite-derived coastal monitoring methods like the CoastSat toolbox.

Strengths

• Covers 40 years of consistent observations from 1984 to 2022.
• Includes data from over 3,000 beaches and more than 100,000 individual measurement transects.
• Provides both raw and tidally-corrected shoreline time-series, enhancing analysis accuracy.
• Includes geospatial layers (GeoJSON) with polygons, shorelines, and transects for spatial context.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Limited to wave-dominated sandy coasts where Landsat imagery was available, excluding other coast types.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Kilian Vos, UNSW Sydney

Collection Method

Derived from Landsat 5, 7, and 8 imagery using the CoastSat toolbox, with tidal correction from the FES2014 global tide model.

Time Range

1984 to 2022

Geography

Pacific Rim wave-dominated sandy coasts, including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Chile, Peru, Mexico, and the USA (California and Hawaii).