The San Diego region is facing a critical choice about its coast. Will the future include a wall of concrete and steel at the ocean's edge, or will we continue to enjoy the priceless environmental, economic, and quality of life gifts our beaches provide?
The region's coast is steadily eroding. Historically, sand has flowed down watercourses to create our beaches. Over the past century, the development of the region's coastal plain has drastically reduced the supply of sand our beaches receive.
The solution is beach replenishment - dredging clean beach quality sand from offshore deposits and pumping it onto the shoreline. This is a much better, and less expensive, alternative to building seawalls, although hard protective structures probably will be necessary in some places.
The beach sand project received funding from Congress through the U.S. Navy, and from the state legislature through the California Department of Boating and Waterways. The project was made possible through the work of local elected officials from the region's 18 cities and county, and legislative representatives in Washington, D.C. and Sacramento.
Two million cubic yards of clean, beach quality sand were pumped onto 12 badly eroded local beaches in 2001. SANDAG conducted a monitoring program to find out how the sand moved from the initial 12 beaches and spreads out along the region's entire 60-mile coastline.
Beach profile data, collected along the coastline of San Diego County dring the period of 1996 through 2004 is available via a ZIP file. The files can be opened using any text editor. Each of the ASCII formatted data files contains a header secton that identifies the source and nature of the data set. The data is supported by additional information files.
SANDAG also completed a Post-Construction Monitoring Report which details how sensitive marine resources were affected by the beach sand replenishment project.
The Regional Beach Sand Project is the first step toward restoring the region's sandy coastline. SANDAG is working on a program to pay for and carry out additional beach replenishment projects to continue this important effort.
Year 1 Monitoring Results
2001 Post-Construction Monitoring Report for Intertidal, Shallow Subtidal, and Kelp Forest Resources
2001 State of the Coast Report, Beach and Lagoon Mouth Monitoring Program
Year 2 Monitoring Results
2002 Post-Construction Monitoring Report for Intertidal, Shallow Subtidal, and Kelp Forest Resources
2002 Regional Beach Monitoring Program Annual Report & Appendices
Year 3 Monitoring Results
2003 Post-Construction Monitoring Report for Intertidal, Shallow Subtidal, and Kelp Forest Resources
2003 Regional Beach Monitoring Annual Report & Appendices
Year 4 Monitoring Results
2004 Regional Beach Monitoring Annual Report & Appendices
2004 Post-Construction Monitoring Report for Intertidal, Shallow Subtidal, and Kelp Forest Resources and Comprehensive Analysis Report (2001-2005) | 
