Abstract:The coastal zone connecting inland and sea-water areas can play a vital role in ocean development, economic booming, commercial intercourse, and cross-cultural communication, due to its richness in natural resources, special geographical location, and unique environment. However, traditional approaches for studying coastal zone can hardly meet the key requirements of timing, broad scope, and efficiency. Obtaining coastal zone information in an effective and reliable manner and achieving efficient management are important tasks that present a huge challenge for us. Recently, geospatial information technologies (GITs), including remote sensing (RS), geographic information systems (GIS), and global positioning systems (GPS), have been developed rapidly, thus providing us with powerful technological support and excellent development opportunities for coastal zone research and management purposes. This paper briefly reviews the applications of GITs in coastal zone. Five specific aspects are considered, namely, coastal zone resources inventory and conservation, environmental monitoring and ecological preservation, land use and landscape dynamics, disaster forecast and relief, and comprehensive management. For example, there are many remote sensing inversion models for monitoring the concentration of chlorophyll a, colored dissolved organic matter (CDOM), and suspended materials in coastal water, which can adequately reflect ecological and environmental health. The study of coastline dynamics by applying GITs is also common these days. Accordingly, we used Gaofen 2 (GF-2) satellite image and identified the macroalgae (porphyra) farming area in Dayu Bay (Zhejiang, China) with a classification accuracy of 97%. We are currently using GITs to identify different types of macroalgae, delineate the farming area, and estimate their yields. In addition, we provide examples of disaster relief and comprehensive coastal zone assessment and management, such as oil spill monitoring. Lastly, we present the status quo of GITs' applications, discuss a foreground for development, and identify the challenges and perspectives of coastal zone studies. Nowadays, GITs have preferable technical reserve in China. High spatial and spectral resolution remote sensing can detect the finer coastal zone features and show their spatiotemporal changes. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) also have great advantages in data collection due to their efficiency, flexibility, and reducing cloud resistance. GIS is a very powerful tool in spatial data storage, editing, processing, and modeling, and can be used in multi-source integration and data merging in Web based analysis and computation. Nevertheless, there are still some difficulties for us to overcome. For example, the majority of RS imagery is affected by weather as well as atmosphere, so that improved image processing (including cloud removal and atmospheric correction) is important in obtaining high quality results. In addition, when we use GIS to manage the coastal zone, we need to reconsider the important issue of how to make system management more convenient and effective, and how to encourage the public be involved into the process. All of the above are topics for further study as far as we are concerned. By 2025, China will launch over 70 earth observation satellites, including land resources and environment satellites, ocean satellites, and meteorological satellites, a fact that creates a big market and many application opportunities. Furthermore, we have developed high performance GIS software. The Beidou satellite (Compass) navigation and positioning system can also provide top quality GPS services. China has been vigorously implementing the strategy of blue economy, and building the "21st century Maritime Silk Road". In order to explore the great potentials of coastal zone and capitalize on its strengths, we suggest to initiate the geospatial big data study and to support the coastal zone research for sustainable development purposes.