Coastal Sustainability and Environmental Resilience in France: A Decadal Assessment of Littoral Dynamics Using Satellite Images

French coastal systems are characterized by strong environmental gradients and increasing anthropogenic pressures, resulting in rapid land cover transformations across coastal landscapes. This study investigates land cover dynamics along the northern, western, and southern French coasts using Sentinel-2 summer image time series acquired between 2015 and 2025. The research aims to identify the most dynamic coastal regions and determine where land cover transitions are most pronounced. A harmonized workflow was developed in GRASS GIS for preprocessing Sentinel imagery, generating seasonal composites, classifying land cover using a Random Forest (RF) supervised algorithm, and detecting changes through time. All imagery was processed using CORINE Land Cover (Level 1) classification nomenclature and projected to Lambert-93 (EPSG:2154). Comparative analyses were performed among the three coastal regions using statistical indicators of change intensity, persistence, and transition rates. The results reveal substantial regional differences in coastal dynamics, with the southern Mediterranean coast exhibiting the highest transformation rate (22.9% of total area changed, at 2.29% yr−1), followed by the northern English Channel coast (18.6%; 1.86% yr−1) and the western Atlantic coast (14.2%; 1.42% yr−1). Urbanization and natural vegetation loss were identified as dominant transition types across all regions. The study demonstrates the effectiveness of Sentinel-2 time series and open-source GRASS GIS methods for long-term coastal monitoring and provides a reproducible framework for large-scale assessments of coastal land cover dynamics in Europe.