Application of Remote Sensing Technology in Tianjin Binhai New Area Coastal Zone Monitoring

The coastal zone is the belt influenced by land and ocean interactions, as well as human factors. So its evolution depends not only on natural factors but also on human socio-economic activities. It has very good instructive meaning to provide timely accurate coastal zone changeing information for exploiting and protecting the coast. Using 5 periods’ remote sensing images covering 20 years from 1987 to 2008 of Tianjin city, this paper extracted the coastline and the wetlands from different years utilizing different methods and techniques of data image processing and visual interpretation based on the characteristic of each RS image. The paper analyzed the law of the coastline and the wetlands changes in both spatial and temporal aspects, and then discussed the major influential factor to the changes by analyzing natural and artificial factors. The results indicated that the total coastline and the natural coastline increased, while the artificial seashore and wetlands decreased in large scale in the 20 years, due to the development of the coastal industry. Thanks to the protection and reinstatement for wetlands, the area of wetlands increased in the past two years.