Back to the beaches coastline in the south of Murcia Region

Abstract

The increasing of the agricultural activity on Marina de Cope’s (Murcia) area, since the eighties of last century, manifested with the transition from a traditional rainfed agriculture to a modern market-intensive production agriculture, has led the ocupation of traditionally unproducted spaces, like foothills and channels of numerous “ramblas” that flow to this coastal system, of broad flat bottoms and easy conversion to agricultural use.
These changes have resulted in a decrease of the sediments that the “ramblas” provided to the coastal system, causing a sediment disequilibrium wich has resulted in an important “regression” ot the coastline in the seven analyzed beaches (almost all of the sandy coast), that has been added to the effect of sea level rise since the 90's. Measurements made by the comparison of orthoimages of years 1956 and 2007 show total regression of the beaches between 16 and 68 m. The mean values are estimated between 0.5 and 1.5 m per year, with a loss of dry beach area ranging between 30% and 80%.