Estuaries are important environments both for natural and economic reasons. Assessing the impact of anthropic pressure on these systems is a complex task, because it is contextual with several natural processes acting over a wide range of temporal and spatial scales. Learning from the analysis of case studies, and exploiting the up-to-date knowledge about hydraulic, morphological and biological processes, this open session aims at discussing to which limit it is possible to predict the natural and human-influenced evolution of estuaries, deltas, and lagoons. Presentations are welcome about all the aspects involved in the problem: hydrodynamics, morphological characterization, morphodynamics, sediment transport and the effect of cohesion, salinity intrusion, impact of climate change and sea-level rise, and societal or management implications, including for instance tidal hydropower production. Efforts towards multidisciplinary approaches and ecological modelling are especially appreciated.

Solicited speakers: Tjeerd Bouma (Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research -- NIOZ) and Huib de Swart (Utrecht University).