New multi-scale shoreline products from TCarta Marine are designed to make shorelines easier to monitor. Offered in GIS-ready vector format, the Shoreline data sets are derived from satellite imagery and accurately delineate mean sea level for the land-water interface at coastal areas around the world.

“Our vector shoreline products are the most detailed worldwide coastline vectors available today,” says TCarta Marine President Kyle Goodrich. “Whether your application requires a snapshot of shoreline locations in the 1970s or continuous monitoring of a changing coastal ecosystem today, we can provide the right data set.”

TCarta Marine is a global provider of marine geospatial products. It is creating the vector shoreline products at global, national and local scales for mapping applications as diverse as environmental protection, coastal infrastructure development and flood insurance rate calculations. Many of the shoreline products are available off-the-shelf, while others are custom derived from archived or newly collected satellite imagery.

Available off-the-shelf, the global vector shoreline products are 1:60,000-scale vectors derived from U.S. Landsat satellite imagery. The data sets include 2 million linear kilometers of coastlines, 400,000 islands, and thousands of rivers and streams. This scale provides broad-area resolution in a manageable file size ideal for monitoring global change over time.

The national vector shoreline products are 1:20,000-scale vectors created for coastal zone management and environmental monitoring of specific regions. Derived from 10-meter-resolution European Sentinel 2A/2B imagery, these products are available both on demand and off the shelf. Vectors for Africa, South Asia and the Bahamas have been created with additional regions added and updated continuously.

“Shorelines are constantly transformed by climate change and erosion,” Goodrich says. “With our national vector shoreline, we are able to deliver frequent data updates that are ideal for ongoing analysis and monitoring of rapidly changing coastlines thanks to the rapid revisit of the Sentinel constellation.”

A classified national vector shoreline is also being derived from the multispectral Sentinel imagery for use in complex coastal ecosystem modeling applications. These 1:20,000-scale vectors contain classified polygons differentiating land cover types such as sand, rock, vegetation and some man-made features, including Causeways and Jetties.

For projects requiring a higher level of detail such as insurance rate calculation, oil and gas infrastructure development, and nautical charting, TCarta Marine is generating 1:2,000-scale local vector shorelines from high-resolution DigitalGlobe WorldView satellite imagery. These are primarily on-demand custom products, and orders can be placed for periodic updates to perform detailed change monitoring over time.

“The local vector shoreline can be combined with the TCarta Marine 2-meter bathymetry data to gain a comprehensive understanding of the near-shore coastal zone,” Goodrich says.

TCarta Marine delivers the vector shorelines via FTP or as streaming data service directly into a GIS or other mapping software. Each product contains metadata indicating collection date and acquisition sensor.

About TCarta Marine

TCarta Marine U.S. merged with Proteus Geo UK to create global bathymetric and marine datasets extending from the shallow coastal zone to the continental shelf. The international firm maintains offices in Denver, Colorado, and Oxford, UK. The TCarta Marine product line includes high-resolution satellite-derived water depth and seafloor map products as well as 90- and 30-metre GIS-ready bathymetric data aggregated from numerous information sources.