The coastline or shoreline is the geographical boundary between sea and land. It corresponds according to the SHOM to "the leash of the highest seas in the context of an astronomical tide of coefficient 120 and under normal weather conditions (without overcost phenomenon). The coastline as defined above is not directly identifiable continuously on the ground or on a satellite or aerial image. From a perspective of studying the displacement of the shoreline, indicators allow us to approach this notion (the vegetation limit associated with the infrastructure limit, the beach limit, etc.).

On the reef shoreline of Reunion Island the limit of vegetation and infrastructure as well as beach limit were retained. This limit results in the production of a line-type vector geographic information layer in a GIS resulting from the photo-interpolation on Pléiades satellite images. Pleiades satellite images from the Kalideos Réunion database (CNES) have been used since 2016 to study the position of the shoreline annually. Launched in 2011, Pléiades is a very high spatial resolution spatial image system (panchromatic optical instrument at 70 cm and 2.8 m multispectral) operating in the visible and near infrared with a swath of 20 km

UMR Espace-Dev