EARSeL ACTIVITIES IN THE FIELD OF COASTAL ZONE MANAGEMENT
Roeland Allewijn!, Robin Vaughan? and Henk Kloosterman!
Survey Department, Delft, the Netherlands;
2 University of Dundee, Scotland
KEY WORDS: Coast, Environment, Cooperation, Management
ABSTRACT:
The European Association of Remote Sensing Laboratories (EARSeL) facilitates networking between laboratories with common
interests. In order to stimulate international cooperation and definition of research projects in the field of coastal zone management, a
EARSeL Special Interest Group (SIG) on "marine waters, inland waters and coastal zones" has been created. The purpose of this paper is
to describe the activities of this group. This paper is intended to give a brief overview of some of the research activities of members of
this SIG, some of which have been presented at EARSeL meetings and at recent Annual Conferences of the Association. For clarity,
these have been grouped under the three headings "water quality", "coastal morphology" and "ecology and vegetation".
1. EARSeL AND COASTAL ZONE MANAGEMENT
EARSeL, the European Association of Remote Sensing
Laboratories, is an association of about 300 laboratories from
within greater Europe, and even a few from outwith these bounds,
representing about 4000 individual scientists. Set up about twenty
years ago to foster the interests of the remote sensing community,
it acts as a pressure group to promote the interests of its members
to such organisations as the European Space Agency, the
European Commission and the Council of Europe (Allewijn,
1994). One of its roles is to facilitate networking between
laboratories with common interests and to stimulate international
cooperation and definition of research projects. One way in which
it does this is through Special Interest Groups, SIGs, and the
purpose of this paper is to describe the activities of one of these,
that on "marine waters, inland waters and coastal zones".
The coastal zone is receiving particular attention at present,
particularly in Europe, because of its extreme sensitivity to
environmental impact, both natural and anthropogenic. It is both
sensitive to and a good indicator of climate change. Nearly half
the world's population live on or near the coast and many of the
major cities are less than 50 m above sea level, so any changes
will have considerable economic and social impact. Remote
sensing is obviously an ideal tool for monitoring these zones, but
because of their complexity, spatial, spectral and temporal, the
challenge is particularly great. The International Geosphere-
Biosphere Programme (IGBP) has initiated a "Land-Ocean
Interactions in the Coastal Zone" (LOICZ) project as part of its
efforts to understand the interactive physical, chemical an
biological processes that regulate the total earth system. The
overall goal of the project is to determine at regional and global
scales the nature of the dynamic interaction between the land,
ocean and atmosphere, how changes in the various compartments
of the earth system are affecting the coastal zones and altering
their role in the global cycles, to assess how future changes in this
areas will affect their use by people and to provide a sound
scientific basis for future integrated management of coastal areas
on a sustained basis (LOICZ report, 1995).
The coastal zone is a highly dynamic region with a very wide
range of spatial, spectral and radiometric variability. In principle,
remote sensing should be an ideal tool to investigate and monitor
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these regions and provide useful input to management schemes,
and it may seem surprising that relatively little use has been made
of these techniques until fairly recently. The main reason is that
many of the current remote sensing systems were originally
designed for other purposes, and as such their specifications may
not be ideal for such use. The spatial and temporal resolution of
most current satellite data are usually too poor to study the
subtleties of many coastal processes, but may be valuable for
providing the context into which finer detail can be fitted. Modern
imaging spectrometers flown on aircraft are beginning to be used
to provide that detail, and improvements in the spatial and
spectral resolutions planned for future space missions will
hopefully provide routine data for operational management
schemes. It would seem that a synergistic approach to the use of
combined dat from a number of sources is highly relevant to
studies in these environments.
In the first two years of its existence, a number of initiatives
within the EARSeL SIG have taken place. Perhaps the most
significant to date was the three day workshop entitled "Remote
Sensing and GIS for Coastal Zone Management" held in October
1994 in Delft which attracted nearly 100 participants of over 15
nationalities, including representatives from ESA, EC-DGXII,
JRC/EC, UNESCO and the Dutch National Institute for Coastal
and Marine Management. The proceedings of this meetings
(Janssen and Allewijn, 1994) contains about 45 contributed
papers, and a selection of 18 of these were subsequently published
in the Association's peer-reviewed journal, Advances in Remote
Sensing. At this meeting a more structured discussion took place
dealing with problems, strategies and actions needed in the field
of remote sensing and coastal zone management, the results of
which were published in a special report (Allewijn and Janssen,
1994). EARSeL also jointly sponsored, along with The Remote
Sensing Society, a conference in Dundee in December 1995
entitled "The Application of Remotely Sensed data to Monitoring
Coastal Processes" and will also be involved in a Summer School,
also to be held in Dundee, in August 1997 on the subject
"Monitoring Physical Processes in the Coastal Zone", in
conjunction with which it is intended to hold a second workshop.
Members of the group have also been involved in two or three
"network" type applications for funding under some of the
European programmes.
International Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXI, Part B6. Vienna 1996
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