A national-scale sandy beach dataset for India derived from high-resolution satellite imagery and deep learning
(<0.05% relative deviation) between U-Net-derived and manually digitized areas. The final dataset is distributed in Shapefile format to ensure compatibility with standard GIS workflows, supporting applications such as coastal monitoring, habitat assessment, and shoreline change analysis, as well as serving as training data for future machine learning models. An accompanying Google Earth Engine web application is provided for interactive visualization and exploration of the mapped sandy beaches. This dataset represents the first comprehensive, high-resolution mapping of sandy beaches across India, enabling improved coastal management, conservation planning, and research into coastal dynamics.
Authors
- Apurba Kumar Bera (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8214-4398)
- Sagar Subhashrao Salunkhe
- Giribabu Dandabathula (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3245-8094)
- Subham Roy (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-6704-2781)
- Omkar Shashikant Ghatage (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-0005-4833)
- Durgesh Nandani
- Sushil Kumar Srivastav
Institutions
- Energy and Resources Institute (IN)
- Indian Space Research Organisation (IN)
- National Remote Sensing Centre (IN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Scientific Data
- Published
- 2026-05-09
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-07408-8
- Primary Topic
- Coastal and Marine Dynamics
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- Indian Space Research Organisation