Coasts, Volume 2, Issue 1 (March 2022) – 3 articles

The unplanned development of a port city generates urban growth in its coastal zone that stresses the local biotic and abiotic resources, affecting the nesting beach areas of sea turtles. This work evaluated the impact of social collaboration on sea turtle conservation in response to coastal rigidization. Over the past twenty years, the Manzanillo Port (Colima), located in the Mexican Central Pacific, underwent vigorous development and urbanization. This growth has produced stressors including increasing levels of marine noise pollution due to the transit of merchant ships, the decrease in 4.3 ha in beach areas, and increased light pollution, which likely reduced the number of turtles that reached the nesting stage. Despite the above, the number of turtle nests has increased thanks to social collaboration through protection actions, education programs, and the participation of volunteers along with public and private organizations supported by the media and social networks. These actions are part of citizen science and contribute to the balance between urban development and the protection of sea turtles, reducing environmental vulnerability in the coastal zone. This success story can be reproduced in coastal cities for other wildlife species to achieve a social-ecological benefit through advocacy projects that involve the empowerment of local inhabitants and the appropriation of their landscapes and natural elements. These projects will contribute to alleviating the effects of coastal rigidization in the face of future challenges that will require solutions to different environmental aspects of imminent climate change. Full article

The sea breeze is an atmospheric phenomenon that can appear in many coastal areas of the world. On the island of Mallorca, in the center of the Western Mediterranean, the coastal breezes present prototypical characteristics. They are so consistent that their effectiveness allows for easy scientific verification. The sea breeze system is defined in Mallorca by its multi-directional spatial behavior and its unifying nature. As a result of the physical insularity of the land, coastal breezes have multiple orientations and act in opposite directions. This means that they can operate simultaneously on different coasts, and penetrate inland areas, where they typically converge, eliminating slope winds and forming convective chimneys, creating storms. In this article, we characterize and label the coastal breezes of Mallorca, and we verify their influence in the places where this phenomenon appears. A broader understanding of them reveals their remarkable influence on all spheres of life and human settlement: climatic, ecological, biological and geomorphological, but also cultural, territorial, economic and social. Full article

Understanding the development of shallow seas is essential, as they provide a major environmental and economic resource. An investigation of the Holocene development and the present conditions of the Andaman Sea shelf was carried out based on hydroacoustic surveys and sedimentological sampling. The results show that the relative sea level in the offshore Phang Nga province (Thailand) was at a present-day water depth of approximately 63 m at 13 cal ka BP. This agrees with the sea level development of the Sunda Shelf. Since that time, the Andaman Sea continental shelf developed as a sediment-starved environment, with less than 2 m thickness of sediment deposited during the Holocene on the crystalline basement over large areas between 60 m and 20 m water depth. Between 28 and 17 m water depth, a series of moribund asymmetrical sand ridges exist. These ridges were formed around 9.0 ka cal BP. They strike oblique to the coastline. On the seaward side of the sand ridges, small NW-SE directed submarine dunefields developed, shaped by monsoon-induced currents. Full article