Author(s)

G. Foti & C. L. Sicilia

Abstract

The main characteristic of a coastal system is its variability. Many factors are involved in the evolution of the shoreline, which can depend on the weather, on geology, and on the presence or absence of river mouths. They can also depend on the urbanization of the coasts or of the interior areas. In order to prevent coastal erosion, it is necessary to clearly understand the interaction of so many factors. In this regard both geological and historical aspects, experimental and theoretical models have to be considered in order to analyze the extreme variability of the system. This paper is divided into three parts. The first is concerned with the historical variation of the Calabria shoreline, evaluated through cartographic analysis. All data are provided by the Calabria Basin Authority and the analysis is made with GIS software. The first part ends with the identification of the areas characterized by coastal erosion. The second part is concerned with the evaluation of the causes of the erosion and the identification of the best type of intervention. The last part is concerned with the latest approaches to coastal dynamic, in particular Barbaro et al. (\“Set-up due to random waves: influence of the directional spectrum”, Proc. of the 30th Int. Conf. on Ocean, Offshore and Artic Eng., Rotterdam, 2011 and \“A probabilistic approach for the run-up estimation”, Proc. of the 5th Int. Short Conf. on Appl. Coastal Res., Aachen, 2011) to evaluate the set-up and the run-up, Tomasicchio et al. (\“A general longshore transport model. Coastal Eng., 71, pp. 28–36, 2013), to evaluate the total longshore transport rate and Barbaro and Foti, \“Shoreline behind a breakwater: comparison between theoretical models and field measurements for

Keywords

coastal erosion, beach morphodynamics, shoreline evolution, run-up, set-up, longshore sediment transport, coastal structures