Publications

Discover the featured research publication of the week

Sandy beaches are important coastal features with ecological, social, and economic significance, yet comprehensive national-scale datasets mapping their extent in India remain scarce. Here, we present a high-resolution, geo-referenced dataset of sandy beach extents along the Indian coastline, derived from IRS ResourceSat-2/2 A LISS-IV multispectral imagery (5.8 m resolution) collected between 2021 and 2024. The dataset was derived from cloud-free imagery acquired under low-tide conditions to ensure consistent delineation of exposed sandy beach extents. Fourteen representative coastal sites were manually annotated to train and validate a U-Net deep learning model, which was subsequently applied to the entire Indian coastline. The model achieved robust performance on independent test tiles, with an intersection-over-union of 0.84, precision of 0.90, recall of 0.94, and F1-score of 0.92. Accuracy was further validated at two independent beaches with low tidal influence, yielding an RMSE of 11.8 m2 (