Preface

The effective management of many aquatic environments requires a detailed understanding of sediment transport and dynamics. This has both environmental and economic implications, especially where there is any anthropogenic involvement. Numerical models are often the tool used for predicting the transport and fate of sediment movement in these situations, as they can estimate the various spatial and temporal fluxes. However, the physical sedimentary processes can vary quite considerably depending upon whether the local sediments are fully cohesive, non-cohesive, or a mixture of both types. For this reason, for more than half a century, scientists, engineers, hydrologists, and mathematicians have been conducting research into the many aspects that influence sediment transport. These issues range from processes such as scour, erosion, and deposition, to how sediment process observations can be applied in sediment transport modeling frameworks. Written by experts in the field, *Sediment Transport - Recent Advances* draws on international scientific research to examine the following sediment transport-related issues: mud rheology, port and waterways maintenance, steady and unsteady flow, fluid mud monitoring, flocculation processes, sediment, and water quality.

This book includes nine chapters written by an international group of research scientists who specialize in sediment dynamics, geomorphology, water quality, rheology, and numerical modeling. Most of the chapters are concerned with sediment transport-related issues in estuarial, coastal, or freshwater environments. For example, there is a chapter on mud rheology in ports and waterways and a chapter on sediment quality in the Bay of Dakhla, Morocco. Other chapters in the book discuss non-intrusive seismic monitoring of fluid mud, sediment removal from oil storage tanks, and formulae of sediment transport in both unsteady and steady flows.

This book is an excellent source of information on recent research on sediment transport. I would like to thank all the authors for their contributions, and I highly recommend this textbook to both scientists and engineers who deal with related issues.

> **Andrew J. Manning** HR Wallingford Ltd, Coasts and Oceans Group, UK University of Hull, UK University of Delaware, USA

University of Florida, USA

Stanford University, USA

Technical University Delft, Netherlands

> University of Plymouth, UK

## **Chapter 1**
