Poster "Using Satellite Imagery for Lake Malawi Shoreline Detection” authored by Barbara Czesak, Wiktoria Kamińska, Michał Glonek, Richard Nyoni, Kamil Faber, and Renata Różycka-Czas has been recognised with the best poster award and selected out of 75 posters presented at the conference: GIScience 2025, Thirteenth International Conference on Geographic Information Science, August 26-29, 2025 | Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand.
The research cooperation and research idea originate in the R&IS in Malawi. The poster was presented by Barbara Czesak on behalf of the co-authors. The award reflects the team’s dedication, innovative collaboration, and ability to communicate their findings with clarity and impact.
Abstract: Lake Malawi/Niassa/Nyasa, the third largest freshwater lake in Africa and the ninth largest globally, plays an important role in supporting the livelihoods of surrounding communities and sustaining its rich biodiversity. Consequently, any variations to its shoreline can have direct implications for local livelihoods, food security, disaster risk management, and ecological balance. Understanding these shoreline dynamics is therefore crucial for effective water resource management, sustainable land use planning, the conservation of freshwater ecosystems, and enhancing disaster preparedness among local populations. However, in developing countries access to geographic information is not the primary focus. In the reality of scarcity, it is extremely challenging to provide long term geographic information that could be sourced from in situ laborious measurements. This study addresses those challenges by using free satellite data for shoreline detection. We have tested CoastSat toolbox on Landsat 5 and Landsat 8 data to extract the shorelines of Lake Malawi between 1984 and 2024. The shoreline was divided into smaller 150 areas and in each area the coastline was digitised to improve the final results. However, we are aware of the limitation that CoastSat is optimized for sandy beaches, therefore, while the extracted shorelines provide a valuable representation of shoreline dynamics, they are not fully continuous. Ongoing work aims to refine the results. The initial findings give insights into past seasonal and annual shoreline dynamics and are promising for future predictions.
Conference website: https://giscience2025.org/
