Widespread coastal clearing in China with regionally differentiated greening

Fluvial sediment fluxes are reshaping coastal water colour, geomorphology, and ecological processes, yet schemes based on single-river loads or shoreline change may miss land-sea responses. We combine SSC records from 19 river stations across nine Chinese basins (2004-2024) with MODIS reflectance to characterize clearing, brightening, regional differentiation, and habitat reshaping. Clearing denotes a persistent reduction in suspended sediment concentration, while brightening denotes the optical consequence of that reduction, namely enhanced underwater light penetration. We classify optical water types (OWTs) using joint colour-brightness features and train four machine-learning models per OWTs; LightGBM performs best in clearer regimes (max R² = 0.89), and CatBoost performs best in the most turbid regimes (R² = 0.83). Based on 21 years of retrieved SSC, we then categorized long-term nearshore SSC trajectories into four directional change types: Further Clearing (FC), Gradually Clearing (GC), Gradually Turbidifying (GT), and Further Turbidifying (FT), and identified heterogeneous nearshore SSC trajectories: 5.0% and 41.2% of waters show FC and GC, 22.0% and 3.2% show GT and FT, and the remaining 28.6% are relatively stable. The typical high-turbidity belt contracts from about 7.5 km to about 6.0 km offshore, and mean SSC decreases from 58 to 48 g m^-3. We propose using muddy-water retreat distance and extracting suspended sediment fronts to track onshore-offshore change. Brightening does not necessarily imply greening, and SHAP attribution highlights reduced sediment input, offshore water intrusion, and stable stratification as dominant drivers, with wind-wave resuspension emerging only beyond thresholds. Our framework provides diagnostics for integrated land-sea management and nearshore restoration.