The use of new technologies for shoreline monitoring has significantly increased during the past 20 years (airborne lidar topographic surveys, photogrammetry, in situ laser scanning) but their definitive adoption still depends on their cost to effectiveness ratio. At the same time, previous work has shown high-resolution (Pleiades-like) optical satellite remote sensing to be adequate and relatively cost-effective for detecting and monitoring shorelines over wide sandy areas on a yearly timescale (Lafon et al., 20105,6). Other high-resolution satellite sensors of lower resolution (Sentinel- 1/2) may also be relevant for this issue, more likely over coastal areas evolving very rapidly, where the annual shoreline changes exceed several tens of meters, like at some places in western Africa or French Guyana. However, this is typically not the case for most European coastlines. “Space for Shore” intends to unravel the remaining technical issues and to provide a large European end user community with prototyped products, that are based on the Copernicus Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 missions and, to a certain extent, on Third Party Missions. This proof of concept is an essential stage before considering pushing a commercial service to the market, that is based on Earth-Observation data. Up to now, the topic has not been addressed by any of the Copernicus Core Services, likely because, naturally, coastlines are in between the land and marine environment and, therefore, are not fully covered by either Land or Marine Copernicus services. Here, we note that the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service has already targeted coastline issues but at an inappropriate geometrical resolution. The Marine Monitoring Service does not focus on coastal areas per se, but provides valuable input data for coastal engineering studies.
Through this ITT, ESA, in the framework of the EOEP-5 program, aims at supporting R&D activities for the prototyping of satellite-derived products and, if conclusive, for large-scale demonstrations in dedicated representative pilot coastal regions of, at least 1000 km length. In order to ensure the funded projects’ overall success, ESA has requested to involve three prime end user organizations.