General News
24 May, 2026
Snaps guide coastal studies
CASSOWARY COAST residents and visitors have been thanked for their roles as “citizen scientists” in contributing hundreds of photos of the region’s coastline – part of a global project studying the effects of climate change.
The ‘CoastSnap’ project relies on repeat photographs at the same location from smartphones.
Members of the public simply place their phones in provided stations fitted with cradles and snap a pre-framed picture – to track how the coast is changing over time due to processes such as cyclones, rising sea levels, human activities and other factors.
The fixed cradles are at four Cassowary Coast mainland locations: South Mission Beach, Mission Beach Jetty (Perry Harvey Jetty, Narragon Beach), Cowley Beach and Cardwell Jetty.
There is also one on Dunk Island.
The founder of CoastSnap, University of NSW-based Mitchell Harley, says over the past eight months in particular, the community has contributed hundreds of photos from the region to the project’s long-term monitoring of shoreline erosion, dune movement, vegetation changes, storm impacts and other coastal processes.
“We basically get a time record of how that particular coastline is changing,” associate professor Harley told The Observer.
“So from the four stations on the Cassowary Coast we’re starting to build up this really good picture of part of the coastline to use and it’s changing or behaving in response to storms, from the cyclones’ blows and so forth,” he said.
The result so far has been an unprecedented collection of valuable research data – just from the simple process of ‘snapping’ a pre-framed photo and submitting it through CoastSnap’s app.
That visual data is then processed with a special technique know as photogrammetry.
“We can basically take the photo from the cradle, and basically it’s that we do some clever geometry and rearranging of the pixels, and we can basically turn that into an image as though it was taken from space,” Mr Harley said.
“It’s like a mini satellite image, and in that viewpoint, that means that we can start to measure changes in the real world, just like as you see from Google Earth or your Google satellite or something like that,” he said.
“One of the things we’re really interested in is changes in the shoreline.
“So from these, from that conversion into this mini satellite photo, we can start measuring the shoreline change.
“But then now we’re starting to do even more different techniques, particularly harnessing AI algorithms. So there’s all sorts of things you can tease out in the photo.
“You know, for instance, now we’re using it to track changes in vegetation by using AI to detect the vegetation and seeing how that’s changing.”
Cassowary Coast Regional Council has also been using the data from the stations, collected since 2022, to support its ‘coastal hazard adaptation strategy’.
The CoastSnap smartphone data has helped council get a clearer picture of how to plan its foreshore restoration and similar ongoing programs.
“For instance, if there’s a submerged, buried rock on the beach, just using the sand level against that rock, that can help give you indications of how the sand levels change vertically,” Mr Harley says.
The researcher says CoastSnap is grateful for the thousands of contributors to the project – it has 160 stations around Australia and 700 in total across 37 countries – including those using the stations locally, and he has encouraged the public to keep snapping.
“The great thing about CoastSnap is there’s a very low barrier to, you know, becoming what we call ‘citizen scientists’.
“All you need to do is see the cradle, put your phone in the cradle, take a photo, scan the QR code and upload it, and then, within a minute or two, with no training, you contribute a useful data point to this long-term program. It’s very simple but very powerful.”
Read More: Cassowary Coast