Development of a Geospatial Process for the Analysis of Changes in the Coastal, Embayed, and Estuarine Surface Waters of South Korea

Abstract

Global coastlines provide vital benefits to both nature and humans alike in the form of embayed and estuarine waters. Often, these coastal interfaces are subject to development and modification by humans and undergo changes which inhibit their natural processes, causing significant damage to the local habitats and removing ecosystem services. This is doubly true in South Korea, where many estuaries have been dammed, eliminating tidal influxes, backfilled to create new land, and finally developed for economic gain. Categorical transitions in surface waters over time may be indicative of these human induced changes, as well as natural processes that have changed due to human modifications of the environment. This thesis attempts to find a way to extract this transitions data for individual coastal features using an automated ArcGIS algorithm. This is done by modifying previous coastal generalization techniques theorized by Julian Perkal and applied by Christensen and Mitropoulos. These works attempt to generalize a coast by rolling a circle along a cartographic line. Depending on the size of this circle, it will draw an arc across areas it cannot fit into which are typically associated with coastal bends like embayments and estuaries. If extents of embayments and estuaries can be defined through modifying coastal generalization methods, surface water transitional coverage can be extracted to provide statistics which can reflect surface water loss and gain in coastal features from 1984 to 2018. High levels of surface water change are expected in locations with dense urban development and damming, while little change is expected in areas with little human influence.