The 7th International Conference on Estuaries and Coasts (ICEC2021) was held in Shanghai, China from October 18-21, 2021. About 260 onsite and 300 online participants from 15 countries and regions attended the Conference. The ICEC2021 was organized by the State Key Laboratory of Estuarine and Coastal Research (SKLEC) of East China Normal University (ECNU), sponsored by the International Research and Training Center on Erosion and Sedimentation (IRTCES), the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development 2021-2030, and the World Association for Erosion and Sediment Research (WASER); and co-sponsored by the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR), the Integrated Marine Biosphere Research (IMBeR), the Future Earth Coasts (FEC), the Anthropocene Coasts, the Shanghai Society of Hydraulic Engineering, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality.

The opening ceremony was held in the morning of October 19 and was chaired by Prof. Qing He, Conference Chair of the ICEC2021. Welcome speeches were made by Prof. Zhenrong Sun, Vice president of ECNU; and Guangquan Liu, Deputy Director of IRTCES.

The ICEC2021 main theme was ‘Anthropocene Coasts’ with the following topics:

• Hydrodynamics in estuaries and coasts: tides, waves, circulations, and their interactions;
• Sediment dynamics: sand, mud and their mixture;
• Multi-scale morphodynamics: tidal flats, estuaries, deltas, beaches, dunes, eco-morphodynamics;
• Coastal management: flood defense, ecosystem conservation, human-nature interactions;
• Estuarine and coastal modeling: physical modeling, numerical modeling of all physical and ecological processes;
• Field monitoring and technology: in-situ and remote monitoring technologies;
• Coastal ecosystem development: eco-morphodynamics, ecosystem conservation and restoration;
• Anthropocene Coasts;
• Special session: Mega-Deltas; and
• INQUA special session: Mid- to late Holocene extreme storm events and relative sea-level changes in East Asia

The programme included 9 plenary presentations chaired by Prof. Qing He (SKLEC/ECNU), Prof. Cheng Liu (IRTCES), and Prof. Hui Wu (SKLEC/ECNU), respectively; 24 invited and 142 oral presentations in parallel sessions; and 35 poster presentations. The plenary presentations were:

• Earth’s sediment cycle during the Anthropocene
  Prof. Jaia Syvitski, University of Colorado Boulder, USA;
• Carbon fluxes in the coastal ocean: synthesis, boundary processes and future trends
  Prof. Minhan Dai, Xiamen University, China;
• Monitoring and forecasting systems for the Greater Bay Area
  Prof. Dake Chen, Second Institute of Oceanography, MNRl, China;
• The WATERMAN system for Real-time Beach Water Quality Forecasting – a Ten-Year Retrospective
  Prof. Joseph Hun-Wei Lee, Macau University of Science and Technology, China;
• The components of a storm surge
  Prof. Charitha Pattiaratchi, University of Western Australia, Australia;
• Sediment motion thresholds in coastal environments
  Prof. Yaping Wang, East China Normal University, China;
• Managing coastal ecosystems in times of climate change: challenges & opportunities for Nature-based flood defense
  Prof. Tjeerd J. Bouma, Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, the Netherlands;
• Nitrogen transformation and fate in estuarine and coastal wetlands
  Prof. Lijun Hou, East China Normal University, China; and
• Diahaline analysis of estuarine mixing and exchange flow
  Prof. Hans Burchard, Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research, Germany.

The closing ceremony was organized on the afternoon of October 21. Prof. Hui Wu, SKLEC/ECNU, chaired the closing ceremony. Prof. Qing He, Conference Chair of the ICEC2021, gave a brief overview for the Conference. The Outstanding Poster Award for Young Scientists was announced, and Ms. Chunyan Zhu, Ms. Shuangzhao Li, Ms. Silu Zhou, Ms. Xiaomei Xu, and Mr. Peng Li received the awards. Prof. Guangquan Liu, the representative of the ICEC Permanent Secretariat, announced that the 8^th ICEC will be held in Quebec City, Canada in 2024 and will be co-organized by the Eau Terre Environnement Research Centre of INRS, Canada and by the Water Resources Lab of Clarkson University, USA. An online presentation was made by the LOC of the 8^th ICEC to welcome all participants to meet again in Quebec in 2024.

The ICEC is a triennial event initiated by the International Research and Training Center on Erosion and Sedimentation (IRTCES). Six conferences have been held in Hangzhou (China), Guangzhou (China), Sendai (Japan), Hanoi (Vietnam), Muscat (Oman), and Caen (France), respectively, from 2003 to 2018. Thanks to the support from related international associations and active participation of experts and scholars worldwide, ICEC has attracted wide attention and become a renowned event of academic importance and global popularity. 

Opening Ceremony

Welcome speech by Prof. Zhenrong Sun, Vice president of ECNU

Welcome speech by Prof. Guangquan Liu, Deputy Director of IRTCES

Discussions

Outstanding Poster Award for Young Scientists

Group photo