InletTracker: An open-source Python toolkit for historic and near real-time monitoring of coastal inlets from Landsat and Sentinel-2

The Australian Space Data Analysis Facility (ASDAF) is hosting a FREE event this week, exploring InletTracker: An open-source Python toolkit for historic and near real-time monitoring of coastal inlets from Landsat and Sentinel-2. Despite their high ecological and socio-economic significance, there is often a lack of knowledge on the long-term dynamics of intermittent coastal inlets such as those found at intermittently open and closed lakes and lagoons (ICOLLs) or barrier islands. Australia alone is home to 305 (21%) of the 1477 globally mapped ICOLLs and for many of them, there are no long-term records of their time-evolving entrance state, which represents a challenge for coastal managers and decision-makers.

In this talk, Tino will introduce InletTracker, a new tool for reconstructing and monitoring the dynamics of intermittent coastal inlets or similar landforms 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 tool that uses a novel least-cost path finding approach to trace inlet channels along and across the berm, and then analyses the resulting transects to automatically infer the minimum channel width and whether an inlet is open or closed. The tool is free and easy to use and provides users with long-term data on the location and shape of entrance channels, the width of entrance channels at the bottlenecks (i.e., at the throat) and the open vs. closed state of an inlet. To demonstrate the usefulness of the tool for coastal engineering and research, Tino will provide a variety of application examples for ICOLLs around Australia as well as other parts of the world.

This session will be delivered by Dr. Valentin Heimhuber , a Postdoctoral Researcher at UNSW Water Research Laboratory specialising on the application of advanced computational methods, remote sensing and geospatial analysis for holistic river, wetland and estuarine management at the system scale.

During his PhD, Valentin used multiple novel satellite datasets to model flood inundation and water quality dynamics across the entire Murray-Darling Basin in Australia (~1mio km2). His current research focuses on coastal zone remote sensing and the economics and engineering methods around blue carbon ecosystem restoration.

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