The approaches employed in the ERA-BEACH project include: (a) assessment of beach erosion at the island level under long- and short-term sea level rise; (b) αssessment of the current and future erosion of the selected (pilot) beaches, based on detailed field information collected using state-of-the-art approaches and the development/application of morphodynamic (2-D) modeling techniques; and (c) design/testing of appropriate technical and cost-effective responses.
Supplementary approaches used are: study of beach erosion trends through the available historical (archive) remote-sensed imagery; development/installation of an integrated coastal video monitoring system (at the Kamari pilot beach); development/testing of a state-of-the-art approach to assess riverine sediment fluxes (at the Eresos pilot beach); development/testing of an approach to study beach attractiveness as a touristic destination on the basis of a questionnaire survey and the application of a bioclimatic index (the CIT index) under the present state and future projections of climatic parameters (at the Kamari pilot beach); cost-benefit analysis of the proposed beach protection technical measures (at the Kamari pilot beach); and analysis of the current regulation relevant to the planning, design, construction and monitoring of the technical responses.
The generalized methodological approach adapted in the ERA-BEACH project is given in the following flow-chart.
