About Coasts

Aims

Coasts (ISSN 2673-964X) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal that provides the rapid publication of articles covering all aspects and information related to advanced research on coastal engineering and coastal management, in the aim of contributing to sustainable development. Since the journal is open access and available online, it is able to offer excellent visibility and a fast processing time from submission to publication.

Coasts publishes reviews, research articles and communications. There is no restriction on the maximum length of the papers. The full experimental details must be provided, so that the results can be reproduced. Electronic files and software supplying details of the calculations and experimental procedures, if unable to be published in a normal way, can be deposited as supplementary electronic material.

Scope

1. Why Coasts?
   Most of humanity interacts with the global ocean in a narrow strip with enormous economic, socio-cultural and environmental values. Many of the world's megacities are at or near the coast. Coastal regions contain diverse nature reserves on the land and in the nearshore ocean. Coasts are dynamic regions where sand levels and wave regimes vary over short (days) to very long (centuries) timescales. Human reliance on coastlines has increased and diversified to an expansive list of ecosystem services. Across the world, humans extract a range of commodities from coastal areas, including living resources, raw materials, agricultural amendments, and other base materials for construction. Coasts also provide an array of services, most notably storm protection and erosion control, but also things like water catchment and purification, carbon sequestration, maintenance of wildlife, and human recreation.

2. Coasts under Pressure
   Coasts experience multiple threats from multiple sources acting at multiple scales of time and space. Major coastal hazards encompass devastating storm impacts, flooding, erosion and the global threat from sea-level rise. The captivating biodiversity of coastal ecosystems faces a multitude of anthropogenic stressors, ranging from wildlife kills at the individual level to massive habitat loss at the system level. Effective and proportionate management and conservation intervention aimed at mitigating and counteracting these threats must be grounded in sound science. 

3. Understanding Coastal Systems is Vital to Protecting Coast
   Our nations, societies, and species are intricately and closely linked to the condition of coasts to continue delivering the critical ecosystem services that they do: Nowhere else on Earth do we find such dynamic natural forces pitted against human actions intended to counteract and stabilise these forces. Because many coasts are naturally malleable modern ideas in coastal management should reflect this dynamic nature. Successful interventions aimed at sustaining and restoring coastal landforms, processes and ecosystems require us to truly understand how coastal systems work: this is the chief thrust of this journal. This understanding will come from many approaches and types of management, conservation, restoration and fundamental science. The quiver of coastal science will have a fascinating multitude of arrows shaped as field observations, manipulative field experiments, laboratory experiments, methods developments, modelling, and theoretical advances (to name a few): we welcome glorious diversity in all forms in this journal.

4. Broad Discipline Scope reflects Diverse Coastal Issues
   Understanding, conserving and restoring coasts requires the knowledge grounded in many disciplines. We encourage contributions from the geo-physical and oceanographic domains, engineering, management and conservation, and biology & ecology. We also welcome innovative papers from economic, social, medical, and cultural studies that are specifically tailored to coastal issues and themes. For example, given the dynamics of coastal landforms and the human reliance on coastal areas, successfully protecting and managing coasts will often entail protecting and managing human health and safety, safeguarding cultural values, acknowledging and shaping social norms and human behaviours, engaging political and governance systems, and creating social and inter-generational equity.

5. Synthetic, Integrative, and Collaborative Research
   Most fundamentally, we particularly encourage novel contributions that can demonstrate ‘thinking and working beyond boundaries’. We will prioritize contribution that report on work at the interfaces of disciplines, especially studies that break down or bridge traditional discipline boundaries, thereby creating new and innovative knowledge that draws on the unique strength of complementary knowledge.

6. Multiple Types of Contributions: fresh thinking to the fore
   COASTS publishes both fundamental and applied research comprising a diverse mix of:
   (a) original ('traditional') papers;
   (b) syntheses and reviews; and
   (c) The FORUM: ideas, debate, dialogues, critiques, challenges, perspectives:
   COASTS will be a space in which creative ideas flourish, critiques and debates that challenge conventional wisdom are cultivated are embraced, paradigms can be openly challenged, and new perspectives are put forward. COASTS will be a forum where authors feel encouraged to practice 'fresh thinking': in this spirit, we warmly encourage authors to propose new (non-traditional) forms of contributions that best capture their ideas and messages.

MDPI Publication Ethics Statement

MDPI is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). MDPI takes the responsibility to enforce a rigorous peer-review together with strict ethical policies and standards to ensure to add high quality scientific works to the field of scholarly publication. Unfortunately, cases of plagiarism, data falsification, inappropriate authorship credit, and the like, do arise. MDPI takes such publishing ethics issues very seriously and our editors are trained to proceed in such cases with a zero tolerance policy. To verify the originality of content submitted to our journals, we use iThenticate to check submissions against previous publications.

Book Reviews

Authors and publishers are encouraged to send review copies of their recent related books to the following address. Received books will be listed as Books Received within the journal's News & Announcements section.

MDPI
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Switzerland

Copyright / Open Access

Articles published in Coasts will be Open-Access articles distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The copyright is retained by the author(s). MDPI will insert the following note at the end of the published text:

Reprints

Reprints may be ordered. Please contact for more information on how to order reprints.

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Editorial Office

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