Project/scholarship details

The knowledge on coastal processes and beach processes in particular is not only of basic and practical importance, for instance in engineering applications (Hardaway and Gunn, 2010) but also of socio-economic relevance (Muir, 2002; McLaughlin et al., 2002). In a crenulated coastline with beaches and headlands, the balance between the incoming and the lost sediment determines the beach stability that ranges between dynamic equilibrium to unstable. Headlands are natural barriers to the alongshore drift and therefore reduce the amount of sediments incoming from the updrift adjacent beaches and, the mechanisms involved in morphological modifications in such environments are still not well understood (Jackson et al., 2005; Backstrom et al., 2009; Jackson and Cooper, 2010; Silva et al., 2010). Beaches behaviour within a headland-beach system is of fundamental interest for coastal evolution once they represent a buffer to the waves attack onto the backing cliff (Benavente et al., 2002). Beach nourishment is a viable engineering alternative for shore protection and an important technique for beach restoration. Any project of beach nourishment requires the knowledge on dynamic processes and displaced sand volumes over several spatial and temporal scales. On crenulated coasts the sediment transfer (source or sink) around headlands and between consecutive embayed/pocket beaches must be properly determined to define the time-life of the beach nourishment. Tracers, sand traps (e.g., Corbau et al., 2002) and morphological changes (e.g., Barnard et al., 2012) are among the common methods to monitor the alongshore transport within the swash and surf zones. Pocket beaches in a headland-beach system pose particular problems due to their small dimensions in planform. Pocket beaches have a very rapid (day-scale) response to morphodynamic processes and, accretion and erosion can occur simultaneously alongshore due to the strong morphological control to the hydrodynamic and sediment transport processes and to beach rotation. At a larger scale, constrained pocket beaches show a conservative sediment budget dominated by interchanges between nearshore and shoreface (Dehouck et al., 2009). It is recognized that the methodology used to determine the sand transport in the field, as well as numerical modelling based on field observations should be improved in order to have a better understanding of the complex nearshore hydrodynamic and the associated sand transport in headland-beach systems (e.g., Pilkey and Cooper, 2002). This project proposes an innovator and unexplored approach to trace the alongshore drift induced by waves and currents that consists in using acoustic techniques coupled with the more traditional approach of marked sands and digital image processing to quantify the amount of sediment moving alongshore. This multi level approach will allow a mutual calibration of techniques. This research will be carried out at the centre Algarve (southern Portugal) crenulated coast where beaches are of fundamental importance to prevent the cliffs receding as well as of socio-economic importance. The main objectives of this research project are: (i) objective 1: to quantify the amount of sediment crossing the shore in a headland-beach system through a multi level approach; (ii) objective 2: to produce a tool in a Geographical Information System (GIS) environment in order to characterize the equilibrium state of beaches in crenulated coasts according to different wave climate, morphological changes and sedimentary transport and, objectivo 3: to improve the classification of the beaches equilibrium state in order to make it suitable to pocket beaches morphologically controlled.

  • Funder

    FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P.

  • Funder's country

    Portugal

  • Funding program

    3599-PPCDT

  • Funding amount

    150,000.00 €

  • Start date

    2013-06-03

  • End date

    2015-12-02

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