Remote sensing monitoring of coastline change in the Yellow River estuary (1976–2005)

Coastal zone detection is an important task in sustainable development and environmental protection. For coastline zone monitoring, extraction and analysis of coastline changes are an important task. Detection of coastline changes by satellite images and remote sensing methods became increasingly important over the recent decades. This study extracted mean high tide lines of the Yellow River estuary from Landsat MSS, TM and ETM+ data from 1976 to 2005, totaling 27 scenes. Results show that: The general pattern of accretion-erosion of the entire estuary was divided into four stages: The rapid accretion stage (1976-1986), accretion-erosion adjustment stage (1985-1996), slow erosion stage (1997-2003), and slow accretion stage (2004-present). The relation between the area and length is presented in Fig.7. There is a clear quadratic trend between the area and length. The relationship has a correlation coefficient, R=0.862, and significant level, P=0.001. For the Q8 course estuary, the total area increased by 8.52 km² with a mean net accretion rate of 0.95 km²/a during the period from 1996 to 2005. Due to the low runoff and sediment load, the Yellow River delta could be eroded naturally for several years in the future.