SHORELINE CHANGE DETECTION AT LARAK ISLAND BY PROCESSING SATELLITE IMAGES

Monitoring coastal areas is an important parameter in sustainable development and protection of the environment. The expansion of constructions in Iran s southern coasts has not only led to the destruction of geomorphological landforms, but has also changed the process of erosion and sedimentation in coastal areas. Nowadays, remote sensing data are considered as the most efficient source of information for the study and interpretation of coastal landforms, tidal levels, changes in coastline, depth of water and so forth. The purpose of this study is to investigate the changes in the coastline of Larak Island, located on the coasts of Hormozgan Province by using remote sensing techniques. This study examines and interprets qualitative changes of the coastlines in a thirty-two-year interval. The main data are images from MSS, TM, ETM+, and OLI sensors of Landsat satellite. These images are acquired in 1984, 1987, 1993, 1998, 2008, and 2016, creating a 32 years interval. Density slicing method is used for shoreline delineation. The classified images are divided into two classes of land and water and the changes of these two classes between 1984 and 2016 are extracted. The net change results indicate that shoreline advances or retreats in different areas.