Anthropogenic Influence On Coastal Environment Using Satellite Cloud-Based Platform

Reconciling the human development with environment conservation is one of the international initiatives as human development is rely on natural resources and human activities shapes the earth surface in many ways and aspects.Remote sensing data,earth observation data are essential for producing information for understanding,modelling,and predicting the human-earth system.Earth observation(EO)data,i.e.multi-temporal satellite images,is a powerful source for analyzing changes in coastal ecosystems.However,with the increasing body of remote sensing and earth observation data,it is still a challenge to directly generate,combine,and analyze the spatial-temporal patterns of human activities influence on environment.The data volumes are becoming too big to download or copy over the Web at the user's computer in traditional ways.The cloud platform,data cube and other technologies development in the remote sensing domain,produce a somewhat revolutionary effect and new opportunities to serve a multitude of domains and routine applications.Coastal zones are of major economic,social and ecological importance.Coastal environment consists of sensitive vegetated areas and tidal flats,which are important transitional areas,bridging the terrestrial and ocean ecosystem.In particular,the coastal plains and the active estuaries,where rivers or streams flow into an open sea,have a high potential for agricultural production and are rich in the diversity of fish,hence,attracting increased human activities.Due to their geographic location,shoreline and coastal wetlands are vulnerable to both anthropogenic activities and to natural disturbances,and shorelines are also shaped by both human activities and natural disturbance at the mean time.In particular,the footprints of human activities in the coastal areas triggered unprecedented land use change,depletion of coastal wetlands,loss of biodiversity,and degradation of other vital ecosystem services.In China,the coastal areas have particularly been affected by land reclamation to create more space for human settlements and industries.There has been unprecedented accretion of land in the shoreline to support economic activities while reducing the benefits that could be accrued from the coastal ecosystems.Shoreline changes and coastal environment may be reflections of the degradation of coastal ecosystems because of human activities.Understanding the shoreline dynamics and coastal ecosystem are therefore topics of global concern.Assessing and monitoring of the human-induced changes in the coastal areas requires efficient and multi-variate analysis of long-term earth observation data from different sources.In this research,we studied the linkage between anthropogenic footprints and coastal environment.There are several variables we used toassess coastal environment which affected by human activities in our research,shoreline dynamics,vegetation change,as well as with changes in land surface temperature.In this research,we used Google Earth Engine(GEE)Application Program Interface(API)and Java Script provides by GEE to monitor and map historical shoreline dynamics,coastal vegetation changes,land surface temperature changes and the human activities influences in Hangzhou Bay.Specifically,we aimed to capture and quantify both the spatial and temporal shoreline changes and to assess the long-term influence of anthropogenic activities on the integrity of this coastal area.We implemented Tasselled Cap analysis(TCA)on more than 1,300 Landsat images from 1985 to 2018 in GEE to calculate the wetness coefficient.We then applied Otsu image segmentation method on the wetness coefficient to detect water bodies and shoreline changes.Further,we adopted the nighttime light data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program's Operational Linescan System(DMSP-OLS)from 1992 to 2013 as a proxy of human activities.To implement,we compared medium term NDVI change and land surface temperature(LST)changes using Google Earth Engine(GEE),which provides both the long-term data for the analysis and the functionalities for automated data retrieval and analysis.We studied the human activities and changes in shoreline,vegetation and land surface temperatures in the coastal areas of Hangzhou bay in China,and,more specifically,links of the environment by human and shoreline dynamics,its potential influence on vegetation loss,and it's potential link to rising land surface temperature.The results demonstrated there is approximately 900 km2 of land accretion during 1986 to 2018.The results showed that there are the strong positive Pearson relation(0.62)and the Spearman relation(0.88)between human activities and increased land in Hangzhou bay,which illustrate the density of human activities increasing have a positive relation with the increasing of coastal lands.We found a negative correlation of-0.5 between human modification and vegetation growth,indicating a potential negative effect of human activities on the vegetation.Contrarily,we observed a weak positive correlation(0.48)between human modification index and changes in land surface temperatures.The results of our research reveal the influence and link between anthropogenic footprints on coastal environment and ecosystem,and will contribute to the sustainable development policy making.This research focused on the methods of using multi-source EO data on GEE.The results of this work reveal the influence of human activities on the shoreline dynamics and can support policies that promote the sustainable use and conservation of coastalenvironments.Our methodology can be transferred and applied to other coastal zones in various regions and scaled up to larger areas to support the coastal sustainable policy making through the analysis results.