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With global warming affecting every part of the world – from forests to deserts – and now beaches. According to recent data, global sandy shorelines are declining in marine protected areas. This change could threaten plant and animal species and cultural heritage sites, according to a global beach survey with satellite data from NASA and the US Geological Survey.
Worldwide, 24% of sandy beaches are eroding. distance of nearly 50,000 miles from the coast, NASA said in a statement. The view from space provided a team of scientists and engineers from the Netherlands with a more accurate picture of the proportion of beaches on the Earth.
reuters
major change
They found that about one-third (31%) of all ice-free shorelines are sandy or gravelly . Africa has the highest proportion of sandy beaches (66%) and Europe has the lowest (22%). The team used machine learning to "learn" its classification software to accurately identify sandy beaches from images taken by NASA Landsat satellites and the US Geological Survey [19659007]. About 24% of sandy beaches are eroding. growth. In addition, about 16% of all beaches erode at "intense" or "extreme" rates and 18% grow at the same rates
. This allowed them to quickly and automatically examine 30 years of data and determine how many of the Earth's beaches are sandy instead of rocky or icy, and how these sandy beaches change over time. "The alternative of taking aerial imagery, placing images in the coordinates of the world, and sometimes manually detecting shorelines, takes weeks or months to capture a coastline of more than 50 miles," said Luijendijk.
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Take this kind of global cliché gives scientists a clearer idea of what large-scale processes are governing growth and the decline of beaches around the world, said Luijendijk. The team found that many of the unprotected beaches in the world are also undergoing changes, but not in a uniform way.
Eroding boundaries
Overall, all of this represents on average a slight increase over the past 30 years, which means that total sum of sand beaches is increasing slightly. The researchers were able to break down these results by continent to find that the beaches of Australia and Africa are experiencing more erosion than growth. The opposite is true for all other continents, where beaches grow on average, what scientists call accretion. "At this point, we believe that continental differences in erosion and beach accretion are largely influenced by human interventions along the coasts." Luijendijk said. "Our next steps will focus on the distinction between human impact and natural dynamics and trends," he said. Marine protected areas include sanctuaries and reserves, national parks, wildlife refuges and national monuments, and may be designated for their biological, ecological or cultural value.
With entries of PTI
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