Aims and Scope

Since its first edition in Genova, Italy, in 1999, the RCEM Symposium has been hosted in 8 different countries spanning 4 continents and has provided the setting for the morphodynamic debate. Since the beginning, the RCEM community has been developing around the discipline areas of fluid mechanics, sediment transport, hydraulic engineering and quantitative geomorphology. The dominant approach has initially been the one of modelling, including analytical theories and numerical models, with the aims of understanding physical mechanisms and mutual feedbacks, predicting patterns and system tendencies and of quantifying underlying processes. During these last two decades, the morphodynamic community has been evolving, impressive advances in computational efficiency and data acquisition have been achieved, and the interaction with a broader set of disciplines has been developing, as also witnessed by the participation to the last RCEM editions. Moving from the same initial spirit that motivated the start of the RCEM Symposium, we aim especially at:

- Strengthening the linkage among the morphodynamic communities that work on rivers, estuaries and coasts, focusing on different approaches (observational, experimental, modelling) and on the potential for their integration;

- Fostering the debate on the role of modelling, the dominant approach in the initial RCEM Symposium and still in the DNA of RCEM, in the light of the state-of-art knowledge on morphodynamics of rivers, estuaries and coasts;

- Exploring how morphodynamics is addressed by nearby disciplines (ecology, sedimentology, forestry, climate sciences, remote sensing);

- Providing a platform for scientific discussion that includes the possibility of experiencing a variety of valuable morphodynamic settings in North-East Italy, as mountain streams in the Dolomites, the Venice Lagoon and the Tagliamento River, one of the few near-natural braided rivers of all Europe.