Effects of offshore dredging - Results of the SANDPIT project

An important aspect of any proposed dredging, whether for navigation or aggregates, is to understand and be able to predict the consequential impacts on the surrounding seabed and nearby coastlines. The recently completed three-year, 17-partner, 7-nation European project SANDPIT has addressed these questions, focussing especially on the hydrodynamic, sediment dynamic and morphodynamic impacts, and the time-scales over which they apply. Defra co-funded the contribution of HR Wallingford to the project, and this paper presents a brief summary of the project as a whole, with more detail on the work co-funded by Defra.