Affection of sea level rise to the carrying capacity at Las Canteras beach, Gran Canaria (Spain)

Abstract

The carrying capacity is an important tool in beach management studies, since it allows too know the area of sand available to beach users. This topic became important in coastal areas, where tourism hass increased significantly in the last decades. The increase of users in a certain area, can lead to negative impacts in the ecosystem as a result of the agglomeration of people. This study is focused in Las Canteras beach (CCanary Islands, Spain), which is a typical urban beach but where the environmental issues are always taken intto account. The method includes the use of orthophotos and digital images obtained from IDE Canarias in combinnation with ArcGis 10.1. To carry out this work, we registered the location of 19,500 users in 10 different mommeents between 2005 and 2013. The user’s perception is very comfortable, because there are more than 5 m2 aavailable for each user. Nowadays, the sea level rise is a fact that, in littoral areas, results in a decrease of beach surface. This reduction will depend mostly on beach slope and wave exposition, but it which will certainly affect the carrying capacity. Currently for a comfortable perception from users (5 m2/user), Las Canteras beach can accommodate about 28,000 people, which could be reduced to 16,600 in the worst scenario of sea level rise.