The Evolution of the South-Eastern Baltic Sea Coastline Between 1988 and 2018 by Remote Sensing

International audiencehis article aims to define and explain the evolution of the coastline in Latvia, Lithuania, and Russia since the late 1980s. Coastal erosion is a critical issue for public authorities and is considered as one of the main environmental problems in the south-eastern Baltic region. The political, economic, and social changes associated with the collapse of the Soviet Union have created new pressures in recent decades in previously relatively undeveloped coastal regions. The geomorphology of the latter is the result of various natural morpho-dynamic processes: swells, tides, tectonic movements, etc. Landsat 4-5 TM, Landsat 8 OLI satellite images series between 1988 and 2018 are used to estimate the position of the coastline. The spatial accuracy of the shoreline automatic recognition based on the combination of minimum noise fraction and Laplacian convolution operators is compared with the manual methods of photo interpretation. The results showed a global change of –0.21 m/year with local and temporal disparities. It can be explained by a variety of natural and anthropogenic factors that disrupt the sedimentary stock and the hydrodynamic forces controlling coastal evolution