Overview

Considering the projected demographic changes globally, there will be an increasing need for dredging in vulnerable coastal regions and river catchments. However, a growing number of uncertainties, degraded environments, socioecological restrictions, and stakeholders increasingly co-determine the programming and execution of dredging projects. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to be able to better manage the positive and negative dredging impacts on the environment and their inhabitants during the execution of the project and beyond (Bray, 2008). Furthermore, lack of indirect and cumulative impact knowledge forces us to organize dredging works in a truly adaptive manner. This ultimately means that we must learn by doing while generating new knowledge that will continuously help to lower the impact execution of dredging works.