InletTracker: An open-source Python toolkit for historic and near
real-time monitoring of coastal inlets from Landsat and Sentinel-2
Abstract
Despite their global abundance and high ecological and socio-economic
significance, the dynamics of coastal inlets often remain poorly
quantified at multi-decadal time scales. Here, we introduce
InletTracker, a new tool that reconstructs the time-evolving state of
dynamic coastal inlets over the last 30+ years from publicly available
Landsat 5, 7 and 8 and Sentinel 2 satellite imagery. InletTracker is a
Google Earth Engine enabled python toolkit that uses a novel least cost
pathfinding approach to trace inlets along and across the berm (i.e.,
barrier, bar), and then analyses the resulting transects to infer
whether an inlet is open or closed. To evaluate the performance of
InletTracker, we applied the tool at 12 intermittent coastal inlets with
different maximum inlet widths (≤30-200m), geomorphological setting and
opening frequency located across Southeastern and Southwestern
Australia. This exercise involved 6363 unique binary inlet state
predictions (i.e., open vs. closed) that were validated against visually
inferred inlet states (from the satellite imagery itself), on-ground
observational records, and in situ water levels from inside the inlets.
InletTracker reproduced the visually inferred inlet states with an
average accuracy across all sites of 89% for the combined Landsat and
Sentinel 2 record (15-30m resolution) and 94% for the Sentinel 2 record
only (10m resolution). Overall, we found good agreement between the
predictions of the tool and the three independent validation datasets
for all but the smallest sites. Our results demonstrate that
InletTracker will enable coastal engineers, managers, and researchers to
gain new insights into the dynamics and drivers of coastal inlets or
similar shallow water landforms such as river mouths, tidal flats,
floodplains, wetlands or delta channel networks. Further, the high
spatial (i.e., 10m) and temporal (i.e., 5 daily) resolution provided by
Sentinel 2 makes InletTracker a viable option for near real-time
monitoring of even relatively small inlets with a minimum channel width
of around 10m and frequent, short duration, openings.