CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE COASTAL MANAGEMENT: A CASE OF INTEGRATION IN THE URUGUAYAN COAST

Virginia Fernandez, Yuri Resnichenkoi

Faculty of Science, University of the Republic, Montevideo (UY)

THE RÍO DE LA PLATA AND ITS COASTAL ZONE
The Río de la Plata is the receiver of the river basins of the Parana river, of the Uruguay river and of a tributary system made up of a group of smaller basins which spill its waters directly in him. It must be considered the great volume, the wide opening that communicates it with the Atlantic Ocean and the importance of its margins where the cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo are settled. For Uruguay, a country with little more than 3 million inhabitants, the management of the coastal zone of the Río de la Plata is of main importance since a very high percentage of their population and the productive activities are concentrated in that narrow strip. Of 680 km of coast that has the country, 66% corresponds to the platense line; from a morphologic point of view this North border is a succession of rocky points, sand beaches, ravines and bays.

Map of localizacion of the area and scales of analisis

In a fraction corresponding to 2,5 % of the territory, one lodges 70 % of the population almost, including areas with a growth greater to 100 by thousand annual and one is present at of 80% of the industrial establishments. The economic activities that are developed include: farming, fishes, tourism and the presence of commercial ports and sport.

THE EFFORTS TO DIRECT AN INTEGRATED MANAGEMENT
In this context ECOPLATA works as a program of support to the Integrated Management of the Coast of the Río de la Plata with an inter-institutional character in which participates the Ministry of Housing, Territorial Planning and Environment (MVOTMA), the National Direction of Aquatic Resources (DINARA-MGAP), the Service of Oceanography, Hydrography and Meteorology of the Army (SOHMA-MDN) and the University of the Republic through the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Faculty of Sciences (the Departments of Oceanography and Geography). The Ecoplata Program has been developing from 1994; in the beginnings it was focused fundamentally to biological investigations and since 1998 started its phase of Support to the Integrated Management of the Uruguayan Coast of the Río de la Plata congregating academic institutions and natural resources administration organisms.

Its principal goal is to contribute to the management integrated of the resources of the Uruguayan coastal zone of the Río de la Plata through demonstration facts at level of pilot areas. It includes the design of management policies on the base of a preliminary diagnosis and the proposal of practices that lead to the conservation and the sustainable use of the coastal resources. It looks for performing initiatives that tend to solve existing conflicts in the use of the coastal resources, as much in the terrestrial strip as in the aquatic part; to develop oriented actions to protect natural areas with low level of modifications until now and corrective actions where have been identified processes of degradation of the natural resources or the environment (Lopez Laborde et al., 2000).

The Program receives funding from the Investigation Development International Center (IDRC/CIID - Canada), from the Ministry of Housing, Territorial Planning and Environment (MVOTMA - Uruguay), from the United Nations for the Development Program (the UNDP) and is supported by the United Nations for Science, the Education and the Culture (UNESCO).

Within this scheme the Faculty of Sciences, by means of the Department of Geography has attended a group of researchers and technicians responsible to outline guidelines for the reordering of the coastal territorial space. This task was based firstly on the compilation of information of very different sources with the purpose of knowing the state of the territory to identify homogeneous zones and to recognize the potentialities of the space to introduce a better definition of the regulation considering the most relevant characteristics and the possible conflicts and affectations.

In order to a make a better handling of the information it was decided to implement a GIS that later would became an input for the organizations related to the coastal management. The area of study of the program includes the aquatic zone corresponding to the Zone of Exclusive Jurisdiction and another terrestrial zone. This approach considers the use of the territory and the environmental characteristics of the coast, like a zone of inter-phase, wide variable, which affects the marine ecological conditions directly, and vice verse. Ecologically, is a very dynamic bio-geochemistry activity area but with a limited capacity to support the anthropogenic alterations and the intense processes of production, consumption and interchange that happen there.

The Regional Diagnosis about activities in earth that affect coastal marine and freshwater environment associated to the Southwestern Atlantic (PNUMA, 2000), expresses that "the problems of coastal and marine contamination in Uruguay seem to have three kind of good characterized sources: (i) The urban centers, which location and lack of planning entail to the increase of the final volume of liquid effluents and solid waste, that increase the load of organic matter on the receiving water bodies; (ii) The agricultural production areas, in which fertilizers and pesticides are applied and finally reached the coastal place; and (iii) the influence of the Río de la Plata, whose waters contain remainders of the great basin of the Río de la Plata, that has its origin in Brazil and crosses Paraguay and Argentina, conforming an enormous river basin of drainage that crosses as much agricultural areas and as urban factories.

THE INFORMATION AND THE STRATEGY OF INVESTIGATION USED
Considering that the technological advance leads us towards the improvement of handling the data being able to contribute with information for a suitable management of the territory, the work was visualized as an initial contribution to the institutions involved with coastal resources. In this task GIS are an essential tool in the analysis of the phenomena where the space is substantial (Birkin, M. et al., 1996). First heterogeneous data from diverse sources were analyzed, entered and georeferenced; after this the data were weighted with a level of measurement (nominal, ordinal or quantitative) considering the pressure that they print on the territory. As a result were obtained a series of simple maps that they went tie through a project developed with Arcview. software

The released information was classified to generate 3 thematic categories that imply each one of them consequently a different level of analysis and an unequal scale of observation. Through them a characterization of the area of the project can be produced as much considering its biotic and physical components like its anthropogenic components. According to each group there can be distinguished:

  1. Strictly coastal themes constituted with data referred to the types of coast, vegetation and coastal ecosystems.
  2. A category of use of territory analyzed through satellite images supported in data of the farming census and socio-demographics variables for a wider strip of about 10 km. This includes a morphologic theme.
  3. One of greater spatiality considering the river basins in its totality with their significant contributions to the coastal area.

Later maps of synthesis were made with the objective to identify homogenous areas and conflicting situations within them. The possibility of recognizing similar situations in similar spaces could become the initial step to determine guidelines for the design of policies; the first approach was made determining areas with geomorphologic and of similar characteristics with the purpose of obtaining homogenous space units, that evaluated based on their potential and its limitations thus to determine necessities of management and conservation or preservation. Soon the conflicting situations can be recognized at the insight of each one of them.

The coastal management constitutes a form of specific intervention, geographically centered in the typical subjects of the river zones, like the deterioration of the quality of coastal waters and the conflicts by the coastal uses. In this activity participative processes are combined with technical task such as zoning, restriction defining to the access and the management of the habitat, including supervision and control. The aim is to obtain a balance between the coastal occupation and a set of objectives of general acceptance to improve the life conditions, safeguard the patrimony and to protect the coastal ecosystems.

In attendance to this approach we tend to express the reality by means of a set of maps with information of different covers but closely related. The zoning is used in the ECOPLATA context as a technical instrument to identify options of use of the territory according to the characteristics and conditions of the study area (Couto, W. et al.,2001).This one is elaborated on the basis of two aspects: the zoning on the basis of physical variables, which it supposes the determination of the structure and dynamics of the different elements that compose a certain area and the socioeconomic zoning, that entails to the identification, characterization and valuation of the forms of use of the coastal area including the partner-demographic and economic aspects. In its totality, the information was prepared for the spatial analysis, considering that the objective is the elaboration of plans of territorial arrangement, where are due to determine the capacities to receive some type of antropic activity in each point of the zone (Bosquet, 1992).

REACHES
The raise of the work as an approach to the knowledge of a reality was made under a model that necessarily had to be adapted to the existing data. The elaboration of the information not always was the most advisable although it was searched an appropriate level of desaggregation. This is expressed in a different definition from the precision of the variables for the different aspects that compose the problematic. Difficulties to access to the information and inadequate aggregation form have been pronounced.

The synthesis maps allow displaying a group of variables, each one of them in an interval that indicates a significant presence on the territory. A report map allows visualizing some possible conflicts that can be generated in the coastal zone. Its visualization at once, right exclusive on the relevant events allows the stakeholders to analyze the synergy of that space.

It is possible to conclude that this tool offers the possibility of making analysis of the zones and the dynamics that take place in them on diverse scales allowing a knowledge with levels of depth and exhaustively required. This largely depends on the probability of obtaining the needed set of data. It lets to generate information to characterize the coastal zone in order to contribute to the development of processes of integral management of the coast within sustained criteria. In this particular case it has been constituted in a contribution for the National Law of Coasts of the Direction of Territorial Planning that is implementing itself. The tie institutions to the thematic have been fortified by the qualification of their technicians for the use of this GIS.

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