Dear Colleagues,

Although largely out of sight, the seabed supports a wide array of interconnecting services that increasingly underpin our daily lives. The seabed is instrumental in the delivery of, e.g., food, aggregates, minerals, energy, communications, recreation, genetic materials and biodiversity. The seabed also provides regulating services, including climate, nutrient cycling and flood prevention.

Seabed resources are, however, vulnerable to the effects of a mobile seabed, the consequences of which are predicted to increase due to ocean warming and rising sea level. The bathymetric variation of about 20% of Earth’s seabed has been mapped and used to inform marine spatial planning and decision making on a range of scales. This largely static picture of seabed bathymetry needs to become dynamic with knowledge of redistributing sediments (via, e.g., backscatter data and samples), mobile bedforms, altering habitats and the potential exposure of marine infrastructure.

Consideration of the changes in seabed morphology and in seabed composition over time will be essential in our efforts to maintain seabed integrity during the rapid rise in marine industrialisation. We need to know how rising sea levels, changing storminess, and heightened wave energy can fundamentally affect the rate, location and nature of seabed modification over the coming decades. We also need to take into account that the seabed is often heterogeneous and patchy, and that this complexity is influenced by, and in turn impacts, both physical and biological processes.

Through this collection, we would like to recognise and contribute to the growing need for seabed morphodynamical processes to be better documented, understood and/or predicted. In this fully funded open access format, this knowledge will become freely accessible to all users far beyond the academic, and should help seabed resource management, marine spatial planning and conservation.

Dr. Katrien Van Landeghem
Guest Editor

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• marine conservation
• marine spatial planning
• resource management
• risk assessment
• seabed habitats
• seabed infrastructure
• seabed integrity
• seabed morphodynamics
• bathymetry
• backscatter