Dynamic monitoring and spatiotemporal evolution of the coastline in Pearl River estuary in recent fifty years

As the third largest river in China, the shoreline in Pearl River estuary has changed significantly. In this paper, we extracted and analyzed the coastline in Pearl River estuary based on topographical maps, Landsat and SPOT images with the use of Object-oriented and artificial visual interpretation from 1960 to 2014. Results found that: (1)from 1979 to 2012, overall change trend of length of coastline in the Pearl River estuary was increased in different from each other's. The length increased to 1322km in 200 and reached the maximum value with 1418km in 2010; (2)natural shoreline in 1979, 1990, 2000 and 2012 appeared on the length of the mutation; (3)In addition to the changes of coastline space, the length of also changed in different years. For example, the natural shoreline length was 218km in 1979. The natural coastline length decreased sharply to 112km in 1990. And then reduced to 10% in 2000.