Austria: Vienna to Host European Geosciences Union General Assembly

Experts from HR Wallingford are helping to organise a special estuary focused session at next year’s European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, Austria (27 April-2 May 2014).

David Todd and Andy Manning are co-chairing the session, entitled “Advances in Physical Estuarine Processes” at EGU 2014. David Todd explains: “EGU is Europe’s largest geophysics conference – attracting over 11,000 scientists from all around the world – making it a great forum for us to both meet our peers and advance our scientific understanding. We’re very excited to be chairing this session, and have worked hard to assemble a team of highly respected international scientists from within our field to co-chair with us.”

Abstract submission is now open, and the focus of the session is explained on the conference website:

“Estuaries are the major conduit through which terrestrial material reaches the ocean. Historically, estuaries have provided plentiful food resources, while in more recent times, their alteration for use as large port facilities and for energy generation through tidal barrage systems has been strongly investigated. With a large proportion of the world’s population living on or near to the coast, and the ever-present threat of climate change, estuaries are at great risk. Damage or alterations to estuaries can result in regime shifts causing hyper-turbid conditions, pollution by heavy metals and other contaminants. Therefore, the understanding of estuaries – their hydrodynamics and sediment regimes – is critical to their future health, and our future sustainable exploitation of them.

“We encourage contributions from theoretical, observational, and modeling studies of estuarine regions. Study areas are envisaged to be those between the LOTI (Limit of tidal influence) and LOFI (Limit of Freshwater Influence), however, contributions on processes that are outside of these limits will be considered should they be relevant to processes within these limits.

“Abstracts relating to physical processes within a multidisciplinary framework, and those addressing the flocculation of suspended sediment are of special interest. To encourage young scientist/student presentations, we will reserve several oral slots per session for presentations from early career scientists.”

Abstracts should be submitted on the conference website by 16 January 2014; requests for help with expenses should be submitted by 29 November 2013, announced hrwallingford.com.

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Press Release, November 26, 2013