I had the pleasure of meeting Professor Roberto Giuseppe Tomasicchio at the Gulf 3 conference, held in Al Ain (UAE) during November 2018. He was participating as a keynote speaker in one of the coastal zone sessions that I attended. At the end of the session, I had a nice discussion with him about the need for assessing and managing ecosystem health of coastal zones by combining ecology and engineering as an integrated preventive approach for adaptation, restoration and protection of coastal zones from climatic events such as storms, floods, cyclones, hurricanes and monsoon storms. This fits into the overall objectives of the AEHMS in promoting ecosystem-based sciences with an emphasis on combining various physical, chemical and engineering sciences towards the remediation and restoration of degraded aquatic ecosystems.
Our discussion lead to several chats during coffee and lunch breaks, resulting in a proposal of a special issue based on papers from the upcoming conference, Short Course on Applied Coastal Research (SCACR) 2019 in Italy, which in fact dealt with the theme of climate change and adaptation studies. Since the proposal was close to the objectives of AEHMS, it was promptly approved by the Society. Fifteen papers originating from the SCACR 2019 conference were submitted to the journal and subjected to meticulous peer review, followed by technical editing by the AEHMS. The papers present a great variety of topics and techniques from European environments, carried out by young scientists who are developing their careers. We are indeed very pleased to encourage their participation in this special issue.
We hope this attempt to bring together ecological and engineering sciences in remedying and restoring coastal regions under threat will be useful and instrumental in adopting the ecosystem-based ideology for assessing environmental health. I sincerely thank Roberto Tomasicchio, Leonardo Damiani and Alessandra Saponieri for their continued support and funding for the publication of the special issue. Thanks are also due to AEHMS Executive and editorial committee for their encouragement and interest in the publication.
Chief editor
Iftekhar F. Munawar
Managing editor
Editorial Committee
Margaret Holmes
Susan Blunt
Jennifer Lorimer
Alessandra Saponieri