The Arona municipality has installed an intelligent system on its beaches to control waves, tides, the influx of public and marine erosion. After the placement of webcams for the uninterrupted transmission of live images at Playa Honda, El Camisón, Las Vistas and Los Cristianos, as well as the start-up of the two weather stations, Arona goes a step further and is committed to the implementation of innovative systems for the intelligent management of the coast through the Basque-French Kosta System technology, developed by Azti.
The system consists of installing cameras on the beaches of Las Vistas and Los Cristianos to obtain and capture images and their spatial referencing. This system is designed to manage three main lines of action: bathing safety, beach services and morphological monitoring of bathing areas.
The capture of these images makes it possible to monitor the configuration of the beaches, in addition to obtaining information on sea conditions, the characteristics of the waves, the monitoring of different coastal processes or the density of users in real time and continuously.
This technology makes it possible to establish patterns on the behavior of currents and waves, which guarantees the safety of bathers. In addition, it also allows those responsible for coastal management to carry out coastal monitoring and maintenance tasks in a more efficient way, making it possible to calculate the density of beach users, identify erosion zones, surface variations and accumulation. of sand, in addition to monitoring the environmental impact on the beaches.
A Basque-French collaboration
The Kosta System project arises as a result of a line of work started years ago by the Azti science and technology center, which develops high-impact transformation projects with organizations aligned with the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, and the University of Pau and the Pays de l’Adour, in France. Both entities, from the Basque Country and from the French region of Aquitaine, agree on the need to “face the problem of coastal management in a coordinated manner due to the obvious dependency of both border coastal systems. The result of this collaboration is the development of its own coastal monitoring system called Kosta System », which is now also applied in Arona. This project allows the use of “measurement techniques with video images applied to coastal systems that constitute an efficient, autonomous and low-cost alternative, compared to classical measurement techniques, such as topography and bathymetry”. The video-monitoring methods applied to the coast were initially developed at the Coastal Imaging Laboratory of the University of Oregon (United States). | DE
