Estuaries are the major conduit through which terrestrial material reaches the ocean. Historically, estuaries have provided plentiful food resources, while in more recent times, their alteration for use as large port facilities and for energy generation through tidal barrage systems has been strongly investigated.
With a large proportion of the world’s population living on or near to the coast, and the ever-present threat of climate change, estuaries are at great risk. Damage or alterations to estuaries can result in regime shifts causing hyper-turbid conditions, pollution by heavy metals and other contaminants. Therefore, the understanding of estuaries – their hydrodynamics and sediment regimes – is critical to their future health, and our future sustainable exploitation of them.
We encourage contributions from theoretical, observational, and modelling studies of estuarine regions. Study areas are envisaged to be those between the LOTI (Limit of tidal influence) and LOFI (Limit of Freshwater Influence), however, contributions on processes that are outside of these limits will be considered should they be relevant to processes within these limits.
Abstracts relating to physical processes within a multidisciplinary framework, and those addressing the flocculation of suspended sediment are of special interest.
To encourage young scientist/student presentations, we will reserve several oral slots per session for presentations from early career scientists.