Assessment of Long-Term Shoreline Change Along Tam Tien Coast in Quang Nam Province Using CoastSat Toolkit

Recently, the Quang Nam coastline in Central Vietnam has been suffering from long-term erosion, which may cause critical issues and threaten the livelihoods of coastal communities. In this research, CoastSat—a Google Earth Engine-enabled Python toolkit—was employed to investigate the long-term shoreline change from Tam Tien Beach to Cua Lo estuary over the last three decades using Sentinel-2 and Landsat-5–8 satellite images. The shorelines were semi-automatically extracted by CoastSat for 203 images, and statistical analyses were then performed for ten cross-shore transects. The spatial and temporal variations of shorelines reveal that the coastline along Tam Tien Beach and Cua Lo estuary experienced remarkable erosion and accumulations during the period 1990–2020. The linear regression rates of the shoreline change for the whole study period based on CoastSat are in good agreement with those obtained from the Digital Shoreline Analysis System software. Moreover, the inter-annual trend for the 5-year sub-period indicates substantial variability in time and alongshore locations. The obtained results provide essential information for the local coastal authorities to make better future countermeasure plans to interact with these phenomena.