**Geological Sciences**

Change in the environment poses certain hazards in certain places. The capacity to quickly and accurate assess the results of an extreme natural event is an ever-present desire. The coastal zone is one of the most dynamic environments on Earth as it is in constant flux due to the interactions between the land, the atmosphere, and the ocean. Evaluation of the impacts of storms on barrier islands presents certain challenges, but our fourth chapter, "Monitoring Storm Impacts on Sandy Coastlines with UAVs" by Alex Smith, Brianna Lunardi, Elizabeth George, and Chris Houser presents an effort to use unmanned aerial vehicles to do just that, with speed and precision as its goal. The authors describe the methods, challenges, and limitations of their new approach in the context of Prince Edward Island, Canada. Their study reveals the effectiveness of linear, aerial, and volumetric monitoring of the spatial changes of dunes after a storm using drone technology. They demonstrate an approach to discerning the spatial variability of coastal geomorphological processes.

Similarly focused on the spatial variability of coastal geomorphology, our fifth chapter "Recent Advances in Coastal Survey Techniques: From GNSS to LiDAR and Digital Photogrammetry: Examples on the Northern Coast of France" examines the effectiveness of the technologies used to gather spatial data. Olivier Cohen and Arnaud Héquette discuss the benefits and limitations of several sensor technologies to gather land surface measurements from which digital terrain models (DTMs) can be derived. The authors employ these methods in case studies along France's northern coast. They demonstrate the implications of the selection of technologies on analysis of the spatial variability of coastal geomorphology.
