Coastal Subsidence: Causes, Mapping, and Monitoring

Coastal marine and inland landforms are dynamic systems, which undergo djustments in form at a range of time and space scales in response to varying conditions external to the system. Coastal emerged and nearshore areas, affected by short-term perturbations, tend to return to their pre-disturbance morphology and generally move towards a dynamic equilibrium. While this issue is well understood, there are limited methods available to analyse and characterise this variability and the resulting uncertainty. Hence, the aim of this part of the book is to demonstrate innovative remote sensing and monitoring system applications to study specific coastal processes like subsidence and their temporal evolution, including uncertainty. In particular, it considers examples of properties that are the best proxy for characterisation of both emerged and shallow submerged coastal areas by combining multi-sensor space-borne remote sensing (SAR and optical), to estimate the variability and associated uncertainties. There are many questions and sites that could have been analysed but the study had to be focused to examples of the most relevant processes for subsidence areas.