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Considering the significant role of beaches for the sea environment and welfare of coastal communities, a variety of process-based models are applied in order to examine and understand the interaction of hydrodynamic processes with seabed material at different time scales. However, a long-term view of this interaction requires a great amount of computational time. In this work a cost-effective methodology is proposed to surpass this shortcoming and estimate bed level evolution. The technique is relied on an objective criterion to assess spectral wave time series of wave height, period and direction and identify the wave conditions that contribute to the initiation of sediment movement. After implementing the so-called Shields criterion, the full wave climate is reduced to two classes of representative wave conditions: the over-critical ones, mainly responsible for long-term erosion, and the sub-critical wave conditions. By applying a well-known process-based model, the representative wave conditions are used as input for the wave-current-sediment transport simulation and rates of bed level changes are obtained, on the basis of which the long-term effects of waves on beach erosion are estimated. Taking into account that erosion is a threatening phenomenon along the sandy beaches of Mediterranean Sea, the present method is demonstrated at a sandy coast of Sitia Bay, Crete. The bed levels derived from the proposed methodology and the full time series are compared. The results indicate reasonable agreement at the selected locations with deviations under 7%, and conformity of the tendency of seabed evolution, rendering the new methodology a useful tool. (C) 2018 Institute of Oceanology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Production and hosting by Elsevier Sp. z o.o.