Definition

In recognition of the beach as a complex socio-ecological system, a beach management tool is any method or technique whose application is itself a mechanism of decision-making affecting the beach dynamic. This category includes (but is not necessarily limited to) the following items: beach classification, beach user density, beach carrying capacity, beach zoning, beach litter cleaning, beach environmental quality, beach management bodies, and beach awards and certifications.

Instrumentation of Management

The maturity of beach management as a set of concepts and methodologies was established in 2009, when Allan T. Williams and Anton Micallef published their book about the topic in question (See “Beach Management”). As they mention there, “Current management is essentially practical (…)” (Williams and Micallef 2009: 44), which infers that some minimum instrumentation is required. Nevertheless, there are very few proposals of tools designed specifically for beach management as a socio-ecological system and almost none from the complexity approach. In consequence, the first step should be to differentiate “tools for beach management” from “beach management tools” (BMT). The former are all techniques, methods, and equipment used to generate useful and worthy information for managing one or more beach aspects in the sense that their outcomes will be used as incomes of management actions on a particular beach. Examples of these kinds of tools range from geographical information systems to erosion monitoring, user’s perception, and ecological inventories, among others. Referring to the latter, although they are also methods and techniques, their mere use is as a management action itself; in other words, their function is not to generate information for supporting management unless it is to make decisions directly over the beach dynamic. This epistemological difference is the milestone on which this entry is based.

With reference to Williams and Micallef (2009), they propose to use three tools for beach management: dimension analysis, function analysis, and environmental risk assessment. The first is an evaluation technique which has not been developed for beach management, but according to the authors, it is very effective for scoping and extremely adaptable in obtaining essential facts for problem definition. The second is useful for considering the environmental goods and services by addressing the characteristics of that environment; this tool analyzes four types of functions: production functions, carrier functions, information functions, and regulation functions. Finally, the third is an assessment process that allows managers to evaluate any proposed development case-by-case and quantify its impacts, with the aim of providing a basis for making decisions about the significant effects of the project. In addition, Williams and Micallef (2009) propose a beach management tool developed in its entirety by them: the Bathing Area Registration and Evaluation (BARE). This innovative tool starts with a detailed registration of the bathing area, considering it as the beach or rocky platform and its surrounding area (~500 m). Afterwards, the five main issues of concern to beach users, the so-called Big Five, are evaluated and rated on a four-scale system (A-D), with support of several formats and tables. Lastly, each issue is analyzed using a classification of 1–5 stars, which allows the identification of poorly rated quality criteria and suggests improvements to upgrade the bathing area classification.

With the exception of this proposal, there are few sets of beach management tools available. Perhaps, the most recent compendium is the book titled Beach Management Tools (Botero et al. 2018), which seeks to highlight concepts, methods, and case studies world-wide. Notwithstanding, the book has 48 chapters, which prove that the majority of decision-making on beaches is already done by tools for management, not by beach management tools. As a matter of fact, in the book only four chapters consider innovative tools, while 37 of them are examples of several tools applied to beach management. Last, but not least, there are seven groundbreaking chapters that contextualize each of the seven parts of the book. To sum up, beach management tools is a topic which is growing rapidly and in a disorderly manner; therefore, this entry seeks to summarize efforts made by a myriad of researchers around the world and to support a clear taxonomy of the beach management tools.

Beach User Density

The number of people on the beach at a certain time and in a certain space is commonly recognized as Beach User Density (BUD), and its measuring unit is square meters per user (m2/user). The vast majority of papers about quantity of beach users are related to carrying capacity (See “Carrying Capacity in Coastal Areas”), but papers about BUD are less frequent, although some values of BUD could be found. Nonetheless, information about the number people on the beach and where they are is extremely important to define beach management strategies and actions. In a paper written by a group of European researchers (Jiménez et al. 2007), an analysis of the temporal and spatial pattern of user distribution in a Spanish beach was done, and the usefulness of counting users was amply demonstrated. As a general rule, BUD is the main status variable to manage tourist beaches, because beachgoers are the focus of management actions.

BUD is a tool with several applications for managers. First of all, it allows them to identify quantity and spatial distributions of users, which is the basis to establish some actions such as: number and location of accesses, toilets and signage, potential risk areas, channels of vessels, among others. Secondly, the monitoring of BUD brings worthy information about the duration of tourist seasons and beach zones preferred by users; indeed, this data is highly necessary in tropical beaches where the affluence of tourists is not defined by the summer season. Similarly, the daily and hourly changes of BUD help beach managers make better decisions about several issues: the schedule of lifeguard service and sand cleaning, the prevention of risks at peak times, and the reduction of conflicts among different types of users (e.g., families versus surfers). In conclusion, recording very simple data, such as the number and distribution of beachgoers, could support the majority of management measures on the beach.

In contrast to the importance of counting users, techniques to measure BUD are not well developed. Different methods could be discovered within scientific literature, from very simple hand counting to high-tech equipment. Initially, one of the simplest methods, as described by Pereira (2015), is a set of 20-m strips which are placed every 200 m along the beach, and, later, users are counted by hand by two people; this procedure is repeated every 2 h during the day and finally registered into a spreadsheet (e.g., OpenCalc). Other techniques are a mix between data acquired by specific equipment (e.g., drones, airplanes) and hand counting. A common example are the aerial images in which beachgoers are counted one by one and registered into a database; Pereira (2014) made a description of several geographical techniques used for measuring recreational parameters on beaches. Another semimanual method is recently used in Portugal, where users are counted by an infrared sensor located at the main access on the beach; in this case, each person who passes the access is summed by the sensor and recorded in a database. Finally, totally automated mechanisms have been developed in recent years, such as those described by Jiménez et al. (2007) in which photographs are taken periodically during the day, making use of video cameras installed directly on the beach, and later sent via the Internet to a computer which automatically counts users through an algorithm based on the pixels of the image. In summary, BUD can be measured by several methods according to the specific budget and capabilities of each beach manager; however, regardless of the technique used, information about the number and distribution of beachgoers are crucial for pertinent decision-making on beaches.

Beach Zoning

Coastal zoning is a concept frequently used to define sectors of coastal areas with a spatial scale of tens to hundreds of kilometers (1:50,000), which is too broad for beach management. Beaches are commonly strips of sand (longer than they are wide) in which several human activities are done in hundreds or, maximum, thousands of meters (1:1000), meaning a geographical view two or three degrees smaller than coastal zoning. Within this competitive space, several conflicts between users and uses emerge as a consequence of the simultaneous activities taking place. Therefore, organizing uses on the beach into specific zones helps managers to get better use of this desired space. Even though these zones could have any shape and size, a definition of the spatial and temporal pattern of beach users is recommended as the first criterion for zoning. Moreover, this BMT is strongly linked to beach user density, because more beachgoers imply more potential conflicts among them and is commonly related to their territorial behaviors and tolerance to proximity (Silva 2002).

Zoning has several applications as a beach management tool. First, conflicts among uses such as fishery, nautical sports, sunbathing, sea bathing, and beach games are reduced because each one will have their own exclusive area. At the same time, conflicts among users are also prevented with implementation of zones for each kind of activity or user group (e.g., families, surfers, resorts). Zoning is also useful to define the location of facilities such as toilets, lifeguard towers, or shading implements (e.g., umbrellas, tents) according to the spatial dimensions of the beach and BUD patterns. Ecosystem protection is also facilitated by zoning because the sensitive natural areas of the beach (e.g., seagrass meadows, coral reefs, dunes) could be demarcated, preventing the presence of uses and infrastructure that affect their health. Finally, zoning is useful to prevent risks on the beach and improve safety, through the definition of dangerous areas forbidden for beachgoers or with a smaller carrying capacity.

Techniques to implement beach zoning should include three main criteria: space, time, and season. The first is related to the width and length of the beach, defining areas or strips with specific activities allowed within them (e.g., sunbathing, swimming, boating). The second criterion allows managers to define zones according to temporal pattern of beach use, mainly during the day. As aforementioned in BUD, some types of beachgoers visit the beach at different times; therefore, zoning should be done in order to allow everyone to enjoy the beach without interrupting the enjoyment of others. Lastly, the third criterion is linked to the seasonality of tourism and its impact on activities done year-round on the beach, such as fishery or recreation (See “Tourist Beaches”). Tourist seasonality depends on climate characteristics (e.g., tropical versus tempered countries) and cultural traditions (e.g., Easter Week, school holidays); consequently, zoning could change according to BUD or specific events. In conclusion, beach zoning is an exercise to organize space and time, starting with a general framework and finishing with a very specific design.

A relevant reference about zoning is a document published half a century ago by the Spanish Minister of Public Works (MOP 1970), which includes the majority of concepts about zoning. Detailed figures recommending zoning for Atlantic and Mediterranean beaches and examples of beaches with reserved areas for specific activities (such as fishery) are presented. Additionally, this book presents criteria to ensure comfort on each zone of the beach with diagrams of space occupied by different kinds of umbrellas and to establish the importance of the “facilities zone.” Another reference of spatial zoning is done in Colombia, where eight strips parallel to the coastline are defined by Decree 1766/2013 (MCIT 2013), from land to the sea: (a) facilities zone, (b) public space linked zone, (c) transition zone, (d) resting zone, (e) active zone, (f) swimming zone, (g) boat access zone, and (h) nautical sports zone. Application of this zoning establishes a general model for the whole country and a guideline about priority zones on narrow beaches. Although this zoning is already done on several beaches in Colombia, its implementation is respected in some places (Fig. 1) and, in others, it is not (Fig. 2).

Beach Management Tools, Fig. 1
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Beach zoning and implementation in Spratt Bight, San Andres Island (Colombia)

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Beach Management Tools, Fig. 2
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Beach zoning and implementation in Playa Blanca Baru, Cartagena (Colombia)

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As a whole, zoning is a technical procedure made with temporal patterns and the geographical information of facilities, ecosystems, and activities on the beach. Notwithstanding, the participation of stakeholders is a key factor to ensure real implementation, mainly by those who worked directly in the sand and water, such as owners of umbrellas and recreational boats. An example worthy of mentioning was done in Santa Marta (Colombia), on a beach called Playa Blanca, where stakeholders and the maritime authority established parallel and perpendicular zoning of the beach in a totally bottom-up process that allowed them to keep this zoning for over 10 years without major conflicts (Fig. 3).

Beach Management Tools, Fig. 3
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Beach zoning made by stakeholders in Playa Blanca, Santa Marta (Colombia) (Herrera 2010)

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Beach Management Body

Beaches should be managed in a geographical scale smaller than the municipal area: a microlocal scale. Almost all approaches of Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) include the local scale as the minimum planning level, which forces coastal managers to make the same decisions for all beaches within their jurisdiction. However, decision-making at beach level is done by stakeholders directly related to the human uses and economic activities on the beach: public service entities (e.g., sand cleaning, ecosystem conservation, lifeguards), tourism brokers (e.g., restaurants, umbrellas, motorcrafts), and beachgoers (e.g., tourists, local visitors). Despite beach management usually being part of ICZM programs, decision-making at beach scale should be a process of microlocal governance, supported by a bottom-up approach and self-regulation mechanisms. Successful beach management requires key stakeholders to do the decision-making and to be organized in a single body which proposes and implements its own decisions (Botero 2013). Furthermore, as Herrera (2010) demonstrated, this beach management body (BMB) needs strong support from local authorities (albeit with a minimum amount of interference) in order to reach an institutional legitimacy for its decisions. A general model of a BMB is shown by Fig. 4, in which blue elements represent the core of the BMB and key stakeholders, while green elements are the local institutions according to their level of intervention in the BMB decisions.

Beach Management Tools, Fig. 4
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Beach management body – general model

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The main functions of a BMB are related to the implementation of daily actions within a tactical approach. The first task should be the short-term planning to reach and maintain good environmental status and tourist quality within an ecosystem services approach. A BMB should have the capacity to plan and adjust its planning in a quick and pertinent loop, creating an adaptive management system in periods of weeks or months. Secondly, a BMB should be the first entity to resolve conflicts among stakeholders interacting on the beach. Prior to involving an active legal or economic mechanism, stakeholders should try to resolve their conflicts through the BMB to which they belong, reducing external interference of institutions that do not have a complete knowledge of beach-system reality. The third function is related to the direct implementation of its decisions, which implies planning, financing, and evaluating each action done on the beach. Nowadays, the majority of actions applied on beaches are decided at the local scale in a classic example of the top-down approach, reducing the interest of microlocal stakeholders in their application and success. Finally, a fourth and more holistic function of BMB is its self-regulation, which includes approval of its own management rules, an administration budget for beach management actions and monitoring the status of the beach (e.g., environmental quality, beach users’ perception). All four of these tactical functions should be immersed within a strategic plan of the beach, approved by the BMB, and in harmony with the ICZM plan of the municipality.

Clear examples of a BMB are still rare in the world. One of these few examples occurs on a beach aforementioned (Playa Blanca, Santa Marta, Colombia), where tourism brokers that work directly on the beach created an organization in 2008 and for 10 years have been overseeing almost every management action on the beach. This very interesting case was studied by Herrera (2010), who was at the same time the maritime authority and reinforced this bottom-up process from his position. Subsequently, other beaches have started similar BMBs formed by self-organized tourism brokers directly related to beach activities.

Conversely, the majority of BMBs are formed by law, and their members are mainly public institutions at the local level. Some examples were found in Latin America, where the PROPLAYAS NETWORK (www.proplayas.org) provided information directly from experts and managers of 16 countries and 42 working teams. The most successful type of municipal BMB is identified in Mexico, where the Comites de Playas Limpias (Clean Beaches Committees) have been working in more than 40 municipalities of the country since 2003. This kind of BMB is comprised of the mayor of the municipality, a delegate of the national authority of water (CONAGUA), representatives from public institutions at the federal, regional, and local levels, representatives of civil society, and beach users. Yearly, these committees have a meeting to exchange experiences among themselves and receive beach awards such as the international ecolabel “Blue Flag” and the national beach award “White Flag.” A more recent example of a municipal BMB is presented in Colombia, where Decree 1766/2013 created the Comites Locales de Organizacion de Playas (Local Committees for Beach Organization), which are formed by three institutions: the Ministry of Tourism, the Mayor’s Office, and the Maritime Authority, although any other institution, organization, or person could be invited to any given session. By 2017, 26 of these committees had been created in this country, covering 56.5% of its coastal municipalities. Their main actions have been to define zoning in principal tourist beaches of each municipality and resolve conflicts with private beachfront constructions, which is forbidden in Colombia. Some other examples could be mentioned, such as the Junta de Playas in Puerto Rico and the Comité Participativo de Playas in Uruguay, which have their own characteristics. In summary, BMBs are not common in the majority of countries, and those that exist have rarely been studied by scientific literature, although there is no doubt about their crucial role as a beach management tool.

Other Beach Management Tools

Equally important to the above-mentioned BMT, there are at least four others worth mentioning. Because these BMT have more scientific and more advanced examples of application for the world, they have their own entry within this third edition of the Encyclopedia of Coastal Sciences. Nevertheless, a brief overview of each one will be provided with the goal of highlighting their capability as a BMT and as an invitation to read these other entries in a common framework of analysis.

Beach Classification

Every beach in the world is unique and at the same time, similar to many others. Stemming from this controversial reality, a tool to differentiate one beach from another without creating a vast taxonomy is necessary and almost compulsory. The classification of beaches is a frequent topic in scientific literature, such as Williams and Micallef (2009) highlighted, although a universal list of beach typologies does not exist. The majority of beach classification is from specialists in natural sciences with emphasis on geomorphology or biology; however, such classifications are of little use to socio-natural systems, such as the vast majority of beaches are. A classification is worthy of management if it is able to integrate ecosystem characteristics with human uses and institutional frameworks, allowing some decisions and restricting others. Williams and Micallef (2009) give a clear example when they propose five types of beaches (urban, village, rural, remote, and resort) and define specific management actions for each one. Additionally, almost all BMT will be affected by the beach classification chosen because tools such as BUD, carrying capacity, litter cleaning, or zoning will depend directly of the kind of beach in which it will be applied. In short, beach classification should be the first BMT applied in any coastal area, when a beach management process is selected (See “Beach Management”).

Beach Carrying Capacity

One of the most popular BMT is the carrying capacity. This concept was first applied for tourism purposes by Cifuentes (1992), in the Galapagos Islands (Ecuador). Since this study, tens of papers have been published with study cases all around the world, Da Silva (2002) being the most quoted about this tool applied on beaches. In general, beach carrying capacity (BCC) is a tool which seeks a balance between ecosystem resilience and tourist use while keeping the user’s comfort at its core interest. BCC is closely related to BUD, because both have the same amount of users as a primary output, although their interpretation is almost the inverse: the latter is the number of users in a certain time and space, the former is the maximum limit of this quantity. Despite the popularity of BCC, several methods have been proposed and none have yet to be accepted by the majority of the scientific community; nevertheless, Cifuentes (1992) has been the most influential reference. The usefulness of BCC is divided into two sides: ecological and tourism. The first is related to the capacity of the beach as an ecosystem to support the development of human activities, such as fishery, tourism, recreation, dumping, among others. Based on this perspective, BCC should be one of the main criteria to decide how, where, and when a certain human action should be done in order to assure the beach ecosystem will resist and recover its natural functionality. The second side is about tourism factors, which has at least three corners: user perception, facility planning, and environmental attitude. User perception is related to the beachgoers’ comfort and the quality of the experience during their stay; the better the perception, the higher the BCC. Facilities on the beach are one of the Big Five established by Williams and Micallef (2009) and require careful planning in order to reduce their environmental impact, which is a complex function of quantity of facilities, quality of materials, location, environmental management and maintenance; the better the planning, the higher the BCC. Thirdly, the environmental attitude of beachgoers is the most direct guarantee of better behaviors and less impact on the ecosystem and other users’ comfort; the more positive the environmental attitude, the higher the BCC. As it can be seen, BCC is a complex and complete tool, with many references to apply and innovate (see “Beach Carrying Capacity”).

Beach Litter Cleaning

The absence of litter on the sand is another point of the Big Five. Hundreds of papers have been published about beach litter, the majority of which have been about the quantity and characteristics of items trashed on the sand. Conversely, research about the sources of these items of litter is rarely and with more difficulty analyzed than counted and weighed. To illustrate this BMT, potential risk to the health of beachgoers is one of the most important effects of beach litter due to exposure to harmful items such as broken glass, syringes, and feces. Another very important item of litter for beach cleaning are those smaller than 5-cm long, such as cigarette butts and bottle taps, which are difficult to clean by manual methods. As a result, nowadays several machines to clean beaches exist, from large equipment for cleaning more than 26,000 m2/h to small machines with their own engine, with rates between 1250 to 2500 m2/h. However, this mechanical cleaning should be used in certain types of beaches, or areas of the beach, without high ecosystem values, such as dunes or nesting turtles. Despite the perception of these machines having a high environmental impact, scientific evidence of this damage is very scarce and those existing demonstrate the great resilience of the beach ecosystem (Gheskiere et al. 2006). Furthermore, technology in beach cleaning is improving rapidly, as demonstrated in the Caribbean, where the invasion of an algae (sargassum) had covered hundreds of beaches since 2013, and nowadays, some machines have been designed for its cleaning. Perhaps, the only litter items not yet possible to clean with machines are the vegetal residues carried away by big rivers, which is a difficult challenge in tropical areas where these inlets transport tons of wood and garbage from river basins and finish directly on the sand (Fig. 5); the cleaning of these items requires large machines and a method that prevents sand from escaping off the beach by bulldozing. To conclude, beach litter cleaning is a compulsory BMT on any tourist beach, although a better method of doing so is by making the decision according to each particular beach (See “Marine Litter” and “Cleaning Beaches”).

Beach Management Tools, Fig. 5
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Vegetal debris carried away by big rivers in Colombia (a Salgar Beach, affected by Magdalena River; b El Totumo Beach, affected by Atrato River)

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Beach Awards and Certifications

On top of beach management tools are the beach awards and certifications (BA&C). Generally, BA&C are acknowledgments given to a certain beach when a high standard of management is attained, usually through the fulfillment of specific criteria. The first and most known certification is the Blue Flag Program (www.blueflag.global), an ecolabel created and administered by the Foundation for Environmental Education since 1985. This award is applied in almost 50 countries around the world, with more than 4000 beaches awarded in 2017. Furthermore, many other BA&Cs have been created in Europe and Latin America with either a national or regional scope, and a limited application; Botero (2013) identified more than 40 BA&Cs around the world, and Botero et al. (2014) describes the 9 BA&Cs existing in Latin America. Despite their popularity, the BA&C have several critics and aspects to improve, such as several authors have highlighted during more than 15 years (Nelson et al. 2000; Zielinski and Botero 2015). Nevertheless, BA&C are the most complete BMT because they cover every aspect related to management of a beach, have criteria to assess advancement, and publicly promote this effort to the tourism sector and beachgoers. Moreover, the BA&C could be an award for reaching good management, but they also trigger better management in municipalities with low institutional governance due to politicians who are easily tempted by the public recognition given to awarded beaches. Even though the coastal scientific community has not reached a consensus about the best way to implement the BA&C, their popularity is unquestionable, as the yearly increase in Blue Flag interest has demonstrated; the challenge remaining shall be how to reinforce the bridge of this popular BMT with the scientific community and the key stakeholders on the beach (See “Beach Awards and Certifications”).

Summary

Beach management tools are any method or technique whose application is itself a decision-making mechanism affecting the socio-natural dynamic. This entry starts with a discussion about management instrumentation and what the differences between “tools for beach management” and “beach management tools” are; in addition, some examples of sets of BMT are mentioned. Later, three BMT are defined in depth, explaining their usefulness, state-of-the-art features, evolution, and some examples: beach user density, beach zoning, and beach management bodies. Likewise, another four BMT are explained briefly, because they are already in one or more entries of this encyclopedia: beach classification, beach carrying capacity, beach litter cleaning, and beach awards and certifications. This entry is not exhaustive about any possible BMT existing, but it covers some of the most common tools used nowadays on the beaches worldwide.

Cross-References