Assessing the role of Posidonia banquettes in coastline protection against erosion, through UAV technology and granulometric analysis: Preliminary results from the case of Schinias-Marathon National Park, Attica, Greece.

Abstract

Coastal environments and in particular beaches are valuable natural assets, offering a wide array of ecosystem services and economic benefits. In this study UAV technology with RTK-GPS is used in order to map in detail, the beach morphological characteristics, aiming to the impact of the presence of Posidonia οceanica beach-cast deposits. The principal aim of this research is to evaluate the relation between the banquettes and the sediments, as well as the banquette's significance concerning the beach protection. Particularly, the distinctive goals are: a) to identify the differences in volume, shape and area covered by the banquettes, and b) to analyze the relationship between banquette deposition and the changes of the sedimentary budget. The presence of the fine-grained sediments and the calculation of the sediment budget enclosed in the total volume of the banquette (692.57±8.3m3 (Mission 2)) will re-evaluate their role concerning the coastline protection.

A Four-Year Video Monitoring Analysis of the Posidonia oceanica Banquette Dynamic: A Case Study from an Urban Microtidal Mediterranean Beach (Poetto Beach, Southern Sardinia, Italy)

“…The deposition and erosion dynamics of banquettes and their composition has been widely investigated by several studies along Mediterranean sandy beaches [24,25,27,[35][36][37][38][39], etc. In the last twenty years, the development of coastal video monitoring technologies has improved the knowledge of beach morphodynamics, including banquette dynamics [28,40].…”