Sedimentary landforms play a critical role in defining the lives of human populations as they affect the flow of water and sediment across the landscape and the coast. They thus protect people and assets from flooding and erosion and are increasingly considered as part of ‘nature-based’ or ‘soft engineered’ flood and erosion protection approaches. Understanding how coastal sedimentary landforms evolve over different time-scales has preoccupied geomorphologists for many decades, but altered future environmental forcing requires knowledge of the stability of landforms in the face of a suite of climatic, biological, and chemical drivers in combinations or at magnitudes not yet encountered. Predicting how coastal landforms respond to combinations of such drivers (e.g. the changed frequency/magnitude of storm events) requires greater knowledge of their resistive properties at a range of scales, from landform response to extreme events and/or steadily shifting baselines (e.g. sea level rise) to the response of individual sediment grains embedded within the landform (e.g. to high-magnitude physical forcing by wind or water). Emerging technologies, such as space- and airborne remote sensing, digital imaging, data-logging and transmission of physical, biological, and chemical processes, are allowing new and unique perspectives on landform stability, but bring with them their own specific analytical and interpretative challenges.
This session adds a unique multi-disciplinary perspective to the challenge of understanding coastal landform stability by bringing together contributions from ecological, biogeochemical, geomorphological and sedimentological perspectives. We are committed to supporting early career researchers and this session should be of interest to practitioners working in the field of flood and erosion protection, particularly in the river and coastal context.