Coastline change assessment at the Aegean Sea Coasts in Turkey using multitemporal Landsat imagery

This paper focuses mainly on the coastline movements at the northeast coasts of the Aegean Sea in Turkey. The Aegean Sea is a semiclosed sea that has unique geographical features and covers an area of 191,000 km(2) . The study area includes the coastal zone located between the southeastern part of the Meric River mouth and the Dalyan Lake coasts. The Meric Delta has accreted toward the Aegean Sea as a result of sediment discharge and transport. In contrast to this, the width of the natural land barrier between the Aegean Sea and the Dalyan Lake has decreased over the years because of coastal erosion. These processes have caused the morphological changes of coastline along some parts of the northeast coasts of the Aegean Sea. In this study, these changes were examined by using satellite data from Landsat MSS, TM, and ETM collected between 1975 and 2001. In the image processing step, registration, ISODATA classification, and temporal image ratioing techniques were used to carry out coastline change assessment. At the end of the study, significant coastline movements (in some parts more than 200 in) were detected for a 26-year period.