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Coastal change, cited

Years of coastal change, in one cited timeline

Draw a site once. TideFrame assembles a co-registered, year-by-year aerial and satellite record with the habitat surveys of record on top. You can measure it, cite it and share it.

Aerial frame of the Shinnecock Bay demo site, 2001: a small harbor basin with a stone breakwater, a beach and buildings on the west shore, open bay water to the east.
Shinnecock Bay, NYFRAME 1 / 8
100 mCENTER 40.84990°N 72.50267°W
Source
NY State Orthoimagery
Resolution
6 in/px
Vintage
2001
Accessed
October 19, 2026
  • SAV NYSDEC Seagrass Management, South Shore Estuary Reserve benthic habitat survey, 2019
  • Shoreline NOAA National Geodetic Survey, Continually Updated Shoreline Product (CUSP)
  • Salt marsh No polygons returned for this site. A missing polygon means not surveyed.
  • Range2001 to 2023Eight aligned frames
  • NY State orthoimagery6 in/pxAerial
  • USDA NAIP0.6 m/pxAerial
  • Sentinel-210 m/pxSatellite
  • CitationEvery frameSource, resolution, vintage, access date

What it does

Aerial frame of the Shinnecock Bay demo site, 2001: a small harbor basin with a stone breakwater, a beach and buildings on the west shore, open bay water to the east.01 TIMELINE02 OVERLAYS03 COMPARE04 MEASURE05 CITE06 SHARE
Shinnecock Bay, NYFRAME 1 / 8
100 mCENTER 40.84990°N 72.50267°W
Source
NY State Orthoimagery
Resolution
6 in/px
Vintage
2001
Accessed
October 19, 2026
Divider at 64%
Frame
1 / 8
Vintage
2001
Source
NY State Orthoimagery

Highlighted: the year scrubber under the frame.

Reference layers for the demo site. Highlighted: the layer chips on the frame.
LayerSourceShown
SAV (seagrass)NYSDEC Seagrass Management, South Shore Estuary Reserve benthic habitat survey, 2019
Salt marshNYSDEC Official Regulatory Tidal Wetlands Inventory. No polygons returned for this site. A missing polygon means not surveyed.No polygons returned for this site
NWI wetlandsUSFWS National Wetlands Inventory. Not drawn on this demo frame.Not drawn here
CUSP shorelineNOAA National Geodetic Survey, Continually Updated Shoreline Product (CUSP)
Left of divider
2004
Right of divider
2023
Divider
64%

Both frames are reprojected to identical bounds, so a change between them is a change on the ground, not a shift in the image.

Highlighted: the divider, both year labels and both citations.

Length
Drawing
Frame width
393 m
Pixel size
0.49 m
Datum
WGS 84

Click two points on the frame. Area, radius and preset footprints work the same way in the full tool.

Highlighted: the measured line and the length readout.

Source
NY State Orthoimagery
Resolution
6 in/px
Vintage
2001
Accessed
October 19, 2026

The line changes with the frame because it comes from the frame. It travels with the image into your report.

Highlighted: the citation on the frame and under it.

  • WatermarkedEvery shared view carries the mark.
  • Time limitedThe link stops working on the date you set.
  • GatedA colleague or funder sees the site without getting the keys.

This demo does not create a link. The mark above shows how a shared view looks.

Highlighted: the read-only mark and the three controls.

Same site, 2004 and 2023

The demo site in 2023, right of the divider.The same site in 2004, left of the divider.
20042023

Both frames are reprojected to identical bounds, so a change between them is a change on the ground, not a shift in the image.

Vintage
2004
Source
NY State Orthoimagery
Resolution
6 in/px
Accessed
October 19, 2026
Vintage
2023
Source
NY State Orthoimagery
Resolution
6 in/px
Accessed
October 19, 2026

Skip the hunt for imagery

The problem

Monitoring a coastal site usually means downloading scenes from half a dozen archives and aligning them by hand. It is slow, and the result is rarely something you can cite.

The answer

Define an area of interest and TideFrame assembles the timeline from the best available aerial and satellite sources, in minutes, not weeks.

03 Validity

“Not detected” is never “not present.”

A timeline is only worth as much as you can trust it. TideFrame is built for scientists and agencies who have to defend what they put in a report, so it is rigorous about its data and candid about its limits.

What TideFrame shows

  • Published surveys of record. Habitat boundaries come from VIMS, NYSDEC, NOAA, USGS and Copernicus, not from a model guessing at the pixels.
  • Frames that are truly aligned. Every source is reprojected to the exact area-of-interest bounds, so when two frames look aligned, they are.
  • A citation on every frame. Provider, resolution, vintage and access date travel with the image into your report.

What it will not claim

  • It cannot see everything. Passive optical imagery cannot see subtidal vegetation in turbid water, and TideFrame says so.
  • Not detected is not absent. "Not detected" is never presented as "not present".
  • A missing polygon is not a finding. A missing survey polygon means "not surveyed", not "no habitat".
  • Years are vintages. Imagery years are not exact acquisition dates, and apparent extent varies with tide stage, sun glint and water clarity on the day a scene was captured.

Built on the data of record

Sources TideFrame draws on
SourceWhat it providesResolution or vintage
NY State OrthoimageryAerial orthoimagery6 in/px
USDA NAIPAerial imagery0.6 m/px
Copernicus and ESA Sentinel-2Satellite imagery, plus derived NDWI, turbidity and chlorophyll layers10 m/px
NOAAContinually Updated Shoreline Product (CUSP) and other coastal layers
USGSNational Assessment of Shoreline Change: dated shorelines and erosion rates
USFWS National Wetlands InventoryWetland polygons with Cowardin classification
VIMS Chesapeake Bay SAVAnnual submerged aquatic vegetation survey of Chesapeake Bay and the coastal bays
NYSDECRegulatory tidal wetlands inventory and seagrass surveysSeagrass surveys: 2014, 2017, 2019

See the full list of every data source

See TideFrame on your site

Available for pilots, licensing and agency deployments. Tell us about your site and we will show you the timeline.

Request a demo