BACKGROUND The United States Environmental Protection Agency has established methods for testing beach water using the rapid quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) method, as well as "beach action values" so that the results of such testing can be used to make same-day beach management decisions. Despite its numerous advantages over culture-based monitoring approaches, qPCR monitoring ha...

Rainfall and its associated storm water runoff have been associated with transport of many pollutants into beach water. Fecal material, from a variety of animals (humans, pets, livestock, and wildlife), can wash into beach water following rainfall and result in microbial contamination of the beach. Many locales around the world issue pre-emptive beach closures associated with rainfall. This stu...

Deciphering ecological effects of major catastrophic events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, storms and fires, requires rapid interdisciplinary efforts often hampered by a lack of pre-event data. Using results of intertidal surveys conducted shortly before and immediately after Chile's 2010 M(w) 8.8 earthquake along the entire rupture zone (ca. 34-38°S), we provide the first q...

Vegetated dunes are recognized as important natural barriers that shelter inland ecosystems and coastlines suffering daily erosive impacts of the sea and extreme events, such as tsunamis. However, societal responses to erosion and shoreline retreat often result in man-made coastal defence structures that cover part of the intertidal and upper shore zones causing coastal squeeze and habitat loss...

Threats to beaches have accelerated the coastal destruction. In recent decades, geotextile tubes were used around the world to prevent coastal erosion, to encourage beach nourishment, and to assist mangrove rehabilitation. However, the applications of geotextile tube in sandy and muddy coasts have different concerns as the geological settings are different. Applications of geotextile tubes in s...

Robust ecological paradigms and theories should, ideally, hold across several ecosystems. Yet, limited testing of generalities has occurred in some habitats despite these habitats offering unique features to make them good model systems for experiments. We contend this is the case for the ocean-exposed sandy beaches. Beaches have several distinctive traits, including extreme malleability of hab...

Monitoring storm-induced dramatic beach morphology changes and long-term beach evolution provides crucial data for coastal management. Beach-profile measurement using total station has been conducted along the coast of west-central Florida over the last decade. This paper reviews several case studies of beach morphology changes based on total-station survey along this coast. The advantage of fl...

Chongming Dongtan is an important habitat for international migratory birds. It of great significance to study its land use and quality change rare waterfowl protection ecological environment restoration. Based on the data in 2002, 2008, 2012, 2016 2020, this paper analyzes relationship between land-use evolution recent 18 years using InVEST model, dynamic degree index. The results show that ma...

Contents 1. Introduction 2. Gravelly Beach Morphology 2.1. Gravelly beach profiles 2.2. Berms and the beach step 2.3. Cusps 3. Hydrodynamics of gravel beaches 3.1. Waves 3.2. Swash phase and percolation effects 3.3. Hydrodynamic effects of the beach step 4. Morphosedimentology of Gravel Beaches 4.1. Size and shape sorting 4.2. Measuring gravel size and shape. 4.3. Bluck models of gravel beach s...