Global warming, melting polar caps, rising sea levels and intensifying wave-current action, factors responsible for the alarming phenomena of coastal erosion on the one hand and adverse environmental impacts and the high cost of 'hard' protection schemes, on the other, have created interest in the detailed examination of the potential and range of applicability of the emerging and promising category of 'soft' shore protection methods. 'Soft' methods such as beach nourishment, submerged breakwaters, artificial reefs, gravity drain systems, floating breakwaters, plantations of hydrophylous shrubs or even dry branches, applied mostly during the past 20 years, are recognised as possessing technical, environmental and financial advantageous properties deserving more attention and further developmental experimentation than has occured hitherto. On the other hand, 'hard' shore protection methods such as seawalls, groins and detached breakwaters, artefacts borrowed from port design and construction technology, no matter how well designed and well implemented they may be, can hardly avoid intensification of the consequential erosive, often devastating, effects on the down-drift shores. Moreover, they often do not constitute environmentally and financially attractive solutions for long stretches of eroding shoreline. Engineers and scientists practising design and implementation of shore defence schemes have been aware for many years of the public demand for improved shore protection technologies. They are encouraging efforts that promise enrichment of those environmentally sound and financially attractive methods that can be safely applied.

Inhalt

Softer Solutions to Coastal Erosion: Making the Transition from Resistance to Resilience.- Nourishing Eroding Beaches: Examples from the West-Central Coast of Florida.- Relative Significance of Background Erosion and Spreading Losses: An Aid for Beach Nourishment Design.- The Use of Relict Sand Lying on the Continental Shelf for Unprotected Beach Nourishment.- Predicting Morphological Changes on a Complex 3D Site Using the Genesis Model.- Methodology of Sandy Beach Stabilization by Nourishment: A Long-Term Morphodynamic Modelling Approach.- Stochastic Economic Optimisation Model for the Coastal Zone.- Shoreline Changes Induced by a Submerged Groin System.- Development of the Coastal Embankment System in Bangladesh.- Configuration Dredging - An Alternative to Groynes & Offshore Breakwaters.- Non-Linear Wave and Sediment Transport Model for Beach Profile Evolution with Application to Soft Shore Protection Methods.- 'Soft' Solutions for Beach Protection and Revival Along the Herzliya Eroded Beaches, Central Israel Mediterranean Coast.- Field Experiments in Relation to a Gravity-Drained System as a Soft Shore Protection Measure.- Short-Term Field Experiments on Beach Transformation Under the Operation of a Coastal Drain System.- Alternative to Traditional Ways of Treating Shoreline Erosion.- Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Submerged Groin as Soft Shore Protection.- Artificial Reef Methodology for Coastal Protection Using Submerged Structures: A Numerical Modeling Approach.- Soft Protection Using Submerged Groin Arrangements: Dynamic Analysis of System Stability and Review of Application Impacts.- 'Back to the Beach': Converting Seawalls into Gravel Beaches.- Micro-Scale Dynamics of Sand Transport in the Presence of Low-Height Submerged Groin Arrangements.- Management of Mixed Sediment Beaches.- Cost-Benefit Analysis and Some Engineering Considerations in Shore Protection Carried out in the Lazio Region, Italy.- Longshore Current Modification Near the Boundary by Seabed Groin Arrangements: A Numerical Approach.- Coastal Erosion Problems along the Northern Aegean Coastline: The Case of the Nestos River Delta and the Adjacent Coastlines.- Beach Nourishment: A Short Course.