The beaches are a tourist attraction and a driving force for the economic development of Catalonia. However, lifeguard services have not advanced much in the last twenty years and many beaches full of tourists are not patrolled. Currently, in Catalonia there is no comprehensive lifeguard system , coordinated and managed by a single entity. This is combined with a notorious lack of precise information and in-depth knowledge of the territory's real needs in relation to water patrol services.
In Catalonia, the safety of beach users is the responsibility of the town councils. There is no law that determines how many human or material resources should be allocated to the beaches, so the distribution of resources varies depending on the economic capacity of each town council. Catalonia has almost 700 km of beaches, spread over 70 municipalities, with more than 500 beaches.
Collaborative research between the company Auditek and the Rovira i Virgili University has allowed the development of tools and models for safer beaches and more efficient services for all users. To understand the objective of this Industrial Doctorate project, we must imagine that we are on a very busy beach on the Catalan coast. If we had to coordinate the rescue and lifeguard service on this beach… How many watchtowers would we place? How far from the water? How many lifeguards? How far apart would they be? Therefore, the Safe Beaches project aims to answer these questions (and others) through a foundation based on scientific data.
The project to improve lifeguard and rescue services on Catalan beaches was born from the concern of Pablo Martin , the industrial doctoral student on the project, to make a scientific contribution to the management of safety on beaches. The impetus of the Territorial Analysis and Tourism Studies Research Group ( GRATET ) of the Rovira i Virgili University, together with the collaboration of the University of Murcia, has allowed this initiative to be realized.
The project begins in 2020 with an exhaustive descriptive study of the lifesaving and lifeguard services of the more than 500 Catalan beaches on the Catalan coast . With the information collected, work is underway to develop variables and management models for these services. The most significant contribution of this research is the integration of a Geographic Information System ( GIS ) in the management of the information generated on the beaches.
Through a cartographic representation, data can be analyzed more precisely. For example, through the representation in a heat map, the points with the most incidents can be identified. These heat maps are a tool that makes the density of incidents visible in real time, allowing a quick and accurate response.
With the help of geolocation, these maps reveal critical “hot” areas, making the task of managers easier as opposed to using traditional incident lists. This innovation promises to revolutionize the way the 70 coastal municipalities manage their beaches.
The research results of the Safe Beaches project serve the objective of enabling a sizing of lifeguard services based on scientific evidence . Scientific evidence can be used to allocate resources and develop surveillance models based on occupancy or incident density. The project has also introduced tools such as the “infoplatges” application that allows georeferencing incidents and expands the possibilities of data analysis. This new tool provides detailed information such as densities, distances, response times and the relationship of incidents to the media. The application is already used on some beaches, and its adoption can significantly improve lifeguard services.
Like any research project, there are challenges to overcome, which stimulate the research process itself. In this case, the first challenge is to achieve a standardization focused on the use of each beach and not on the financial capacities of the municipalities . To achieve this, it is crucial to create data-based models. Currently, the funds allocated to lifeguarding on beaches are more associated with the economic capacity of the municipalities than with the real needs of the beach. As a result, the highly occupied beaches of the smallest municipalities do not have lifeguarding services. The next challenge is to advance in the implementation of technological instruments that provide the essential data to devise more effective solutions, adapted to the evolution of the circumstances of the beaches.
