Monitoring waterline changes in coastal wetlands in the yellow river delta from long period remote sensing data

This paper proposed a method of combining the Modified Normalized Difference Water Index (MNDWI), morphological operators (MOs) and seeded region growing (SRG) to extract waterline information from remote sensing satellite images, and applied this approach to a long period (from 1987 to 2010) Landsat TM dataset to acquire the waterline changes in the coastal wetlands in the Yellow River Delta (YRD). The results showed general agreement with other studies in YRD. The natural waterline in Dongying witnessed erosion at different scales during the study period, except for the Yellow River mouth. Both natural and artificial factors had impact on the erosion of waterline in the north part of YRD. Meanwhile, climate was probably the main determining factor of waterline in the southeast part. However, the artificial waterline in northeast barely changed, indicating the protective function of the artificial embankment.