Magnitude and Causes of Beach Accretion on the Eastern Margin of the Tayrona National Natural Park (Colombian Caribbean)

Abstract

Beaches on the eastern margin of Tayrona National Natural Park experienced stability and even accretion over the last decade, in contrast to general erosion along the Colombian Caribbean coast. The objective of this study is to characterize shoreline change and analyze the factors contributing to the accretionary trend. Orthorectified satellite images, combined with topography from both drone images and RTK-DGPS measurements, were used to map successive shorelines from 2002-2008. Net shoreline movement and shoreline migration rates revealed these beaches had an accretionary trend, with the exception of Piscina Beach that eroded during the time period. The maintenance of natural inputs of sediment from local rivers, redistributed by littoral drift with sediment bypassing across the small headlands limiting the beaches, the resilience of the beaches to the impact of hurricanes and low human pressure allows for a positive sedimentary budget for the beaches. Piscinas Beach is the most cut off from fluvial sediment input, and despite it has a coral reef barrier, its dissipative profile indicate that it is the most exposed to wave impact.

Coast Change: Understanding Sensitivity to Beach Loss for Coastal Tourism in the Colombian Caribbean

“…The Colombian Caribbean's beach-dune system is destabilized due to natural factors and anthropic intervention [3,[20][21][22]. Human activities control the recent evolution of the coastal environment, potentially interfering with dune dynamics and natural phenomena, such as sea level rise, climate-related erosion processes, and vegetation loss [20,21]. Other impacts observed are related to human settlements, specifically the development of beach…”

Large Wood Debris Contributes to Beach Ecosystems but Colombian Beachgoer’s Do Not Recognize It

“…Since past decades, the accretion and erosion processes affect the Caribbean coast. The accretion processes occur mostly on localized river mouth and deltaic zones [83,84], but beach retreat has been the dominant trend [83,85,86].…”

“…Remote sensing products, such as high-resolution satellite images from Google Earth ® (2004, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, and 2020) were used in this study, which is an already wellestablished technique in several publications [84,96]. Moreover, high-resolution aerial photographs were taken using a Mavic 2 Pro drone in October, 2019.…”

“…The use of satellite images from Google Earth and drone orthomosaic photos, in conjunction with Geographic Information System (GIS), has progressively improved resolution and versatility for shoreline extraction and mapping of changes in migration [84,86,[101][102][103][104][105]. In this study, the changes in the shoreline were analyzed over 16 years (2004-2020).…”

Assessing Coastal Erosion and Sediment Removal in the sand bar of the Isla Salamanca: Implications for the Barranquilla-Ciénaga Highway and coastal marine biodiversity – Colombia

“…Sea level rise, induced by climate change, results in more frequent storm surges resulting in chronic coastal erosion (Ranasinghe 2016), which could lead to devastating socio-economic effects, such as the degradation of urban structures. In addition to these factors, human intervention in coastal areas, including the construction of highway and other infrastructure and urban services, alters this system and introduces high values of environmental imbalance, resulting in increased erosion rates ( In the Colombian Caribbean coast there are erosive tendencies causing negative coastal morphological changes due to a marked anthropic in uence (Posada and Henao 2008;Rangel Buitrago 2009;Manzolli et al 2020;Villate et al 2020a). The department of Magdalena has moderate to critical erosion, with the worst scenarios located on the highway RN90 connecting Barranquilla-Pueblo Viejo at kilometers 19 and 29.…”