Global Coastal Transect System (GCTS)

Cross-shore coastal transects are essential to coastal monitoring, offering a consistent reference line to measure coastal change, while providing a robust foundation to map coastal characteristics and derive coastal statistics thereof. The Global Coastal Transect System consists of more than 11 million cross-shore coastal transects uniformly spaced at 100-m intervals alongshore, for all OpenStreetMap coastlines that are longer than 5 kilometers.

While the data is available here for download, we highly recommend direct access via the cloud. For latest usage instructions please see the tutorials at https://github.com/TUDelft-CITG/coastpy. The dataset is extensively described in Calkoen, F. R., Luijendijk, A. P., Vos, K., Kras, E., & Baart, F. (2025). Enabling coastal analytics at planetary scale. Environmental Modelling & Software, 183, 106257; please cite this paper when the data is used.