Video monitoring of near-shore coastal zones
Coastal zones are vital resources for most countries as far as wildlife, physical resources, protection against flooding, recreation and safety are concerned. During the past years, the rise in sea level coming from global warming combined with the increased incidence of storms have increased the risk of flooding of coastal communities. Since coastal zones constitute a valuable asset for most countries effective coastal zone management strategy needs to be formulated. Urged by this the CoastView project focused on developing effective means of monitoring European coastlines in an effort to support coastal zone management. More specifically, researchers focused on developing video-derived Coastal State Indicators (CSIs), as a minimum set of parameters for quantitative description of the dynamic state of a coastal system. In this way coast managers will derive less complicated information about physical state of the coastline than they potentially do. Part of the project results involved the development of new improved monitoring systems that are capable of collecting required data for the determination of CSIs. With the aid of an appropriately set time-scale for deriving data to monitor the coastal evolution, the fully-digital video systems offer high quality video related to near-shore coastal zones. System features include better pixel resolution and image quality, as well as increased flexibility concerning the specification of data collection schemes and lower costs for 2-3 camera stations. Presently the systems are operational at three different monitoring sites in the southern Europe. A license agreement is sought for deploying the systems, providing software for image analysis, visualising results, and contributing to image analysis.