Beach nourishment design: an integrated approach

Beach nourishment design requires a multi-disciplinary approach, the main aspect of design is related to a deep knowledge of the coastal zone and its processes to define: suitable kind of beach nourishment, characteristic of fill material and availability of submarine borrow sites. For an improved/integrated design need to be considered not only the Equilibrium Profile Theory and Depth of Closure, with their time-scale related aspects, but also environmental quality and suitability of resources. The most important beach nourishment problem it's to find a suitable site with high 'quality' material. In this paper the Authors underline that quality is not a strictly design concept but it's also referred to a more complex combination of sedimentologic, biogeochemical and environmental parameters whose equilibrium is sometimes difficult to define at the borrow site and at the eroded beach too. An integrated methodology is proposed to face the sand mining referring to sediment quality parameters definition.