Finland Coastal Change

The Finland Coastal Change is a multi-temporal dataset of coastal land cover, shoreline position and shoreline displacement along the coast of Finland during 1985–2024.

The data were created applying the procedure of Nylén et al. (2025), with certain modifications to account for the characteristics of the study area. The procedure utilized the full Landsat collection in Google Earth Engine (namely, Landsat 5, Landsat 7, Landsat 8 and Landsat 9). Version v01 consists of data that haven't been fully validated in the field or against national datasets. The data quality is expected to correspond to that reported for the Arctic coast in Nylén et al. (2025). All data are in ETRS-TM35FIN coordinate reference system (EPSG:3067).

*Data structure*

*Coastal land cover time-series 1985–2024*

The coastal land cover files classify 30-meter pixels into land and water. Land cover is averaged over five-year time-steps, starting from 1985–1989 and ending in 2020–2024. The name of each of the eight raster image files indicates the start year of the time-step.

Each raster image has one land cover band ("landcover"). The pixel values indicate following:

- 1 = land
- 2 = water
- NA = less than five valid satellite image observations (no such pixels in the data) or outside the coastal zone

*Shoreline time-series 1985–2024*

Vector data describing the historical location of the Finnish shoreline during each of the eight time-steps and calculated from the coastal land cover data. The geojson file name indicates the start year of the time-step. The linestring features have following attributes:

- 'timestep': the start-year of the time-step
- 'length_m': the length of the linestring feature in meters

*Shoreline displacement rates 1985–2024*

Rates of shoreline displacement, calculated at shore-normal transects with a 500-meter spacing and stored at transect mid points (n = 35 696). The attributes of the point feature describe shoreline displacement from different perspectives using following widely used metrics (see USGS Digital Shoreline Analysis System DSAS, Henderson et al. 2026):

- 'NSM': net shoreline movement (m), displacement between oldest and newest shoreline. Positive values indicate seaward displacement
- 'SCE': shoreline change envelope (m), maximum distance among all historical shorelines
- 'EPR': end-point-rate (m/year), displacement between first and last observation divided by the number of years. Positive values indicate seaward displacement
- 'EPR_uncertainty': uncertainty of the end-point-rate (m)
- 'LRR': linear regression rate (m/year), average displacement rate calculated by fitting a linear regression model to all observations. Positive values indicate seaward displacement. Calculated only for transects that intersect at least three shorelines
- 'LRR_SE': standard error of the linear regression rate

The attributes also include:

- 'shorelines': the number of shorelines intersected by the transect (up to 8)
- 'timespan': the length of the time-series that is created by shorelines intersecting the transect (years, up to 35 years)

The original transects (with 500-meter spacing and two kilometers each) are also included in the dataset.

*References*

Nylén, T., Calle, M., Gonzales-Inca, C. (2025). Unveiling coastal change across the Arctic with full Landsat collections and data fusion. Remote Sensing of Environment 322, 114696. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2025.114696.

Henderson, R.E., Farris, A.S., Kratzmann, M.G., Bartlett, M.K., Ergul, A., McAndrews, J., Cibaj, R., Zichichi, J.L., Himmelstoss, E.A., Thieler, E.R. (2026). Digital Shoreline Analysis System version 6.1: U.S. Geological Survey software release. https://doi.org/10.5066/P1NHMJNC.