50 years of coastal erosion rates analysis: A new methodological approach

Abstract

The Research Group “Coastal Management and Territorial Information Technologies” (RNM-177) has developed a new methodological approach for erosion rates calculation, analysis and web dissemination for all the exposed beaches of Andalusia (640 Kms). Although, erosion rates in Andalusia had been previously calculated using different proxies, photointerpretation criteria, time periods, scales and flights dates, none was carried out at regional scale and thus making difficult the integration of results for extracting regional trends of erosional processes. The proposed new method has three main contributions: (i) The use of different proxies digitized at detailed scale (1:2500) for the entire coast of Andalusia. The proxies were digitized by a unique interpreter using historical and modern public collection of ortophotographies.; (ii) The integration of related coastal thematic information (coastal typology, presence of infrastructures, foredunes width, etc.) to the geometry of the proxies in order to improve rates interpretation, analysis and further exploitation; (iii) The design of a complex data model (implemented in PostgreSQL/PostGIS) that integrates rates calculation results from different time periods with thematic information and specific tables for semiology treatment, enhancing indicator/index construction and web dissemination (using OGC services and a web geoviewer).