The Italian coasts: A natural laboratory for the quality evaluation of beach replenishments

The present paper describes the joint research recently carried out by the University of Parma and the ENEA Marine Research Centre of La Spezia for the characterization of grain-size and petrography of the Native sediments of the Italian marine coastal territory. The work aims to establish a protocol for the evaluation of the "quality' of artificial beach replenishment fills. GIS technologies have been used to create a national database on coastal cells. The Italian territory is composed of 188 Littoral Cells if coastal stretches less than 5 km long are ignored. On these Cells over two hundred sample couples of dune and beach sediment were collected and analysed for grain-size and thin-section petrography. The original petrographic classification adopted here is also suitable to the collection of literature data and is based on four fundamental sediment sources named Terrigenous silicate, Terrigenous carbonate, Indigenous and Pyroclastic, that may expand into eight petrographic composi...