SunRISE (du 01/02/2015 au 31/01/2017)
Flux sédimentaires, turbidité et intégrité des fonds pour la Stratégie pour le Milieu Marin
Description:
The goal of this project is to gather the national and international experts to be solicited in order to fully address the issues regarding sediment fluxes at a regional scale. It will create a missing link between the different scientific communities working from the continental or coastal sediment source to the continental shelf, from the “observation” world to the “modelling” world as well as the “technical” world. Shared projects and objectives are the best way to motivate true collaborations between specialties that may seem, from afar, to fall under the same disciplinary field (“sediment dynamics”), but that actually exhibit a vast diversity of approaches and expertise depending on the investigated time scale or space scales. The SunRISE network will build a scientific environment where researchers will share advances on measurement devices and techniques, sedimentary processes, integrative numerical models, and monitoring approaches. Through the construction of international proposals, this network will foster in particular a French leadership in addressing some of the WFD and MSFD issues. Little attention has been paid to the regional investigation of sediment flux dynamics in the marine environment. Past investigations were usually restricted to fairly local areas, and lacked integrative “source to sink” type approaches. These limitations result from the overall sediment dynamics complexity: the rigorous assessment of these fluxes requires understanding transport processes of mineral particles in the water column as well as their behaviour in the seabed, oftentimes under the influence of biota (impacting flocculation processes, resuspension capacities and consolidation within the sediment). Investigating sediment fluxes from their continental source to the shelf still requires advanced research dedicated to the improvement of measurement techniques (particularly for sand transport, but also to qualify optic and acoustic devices) as well as the improvement of modelling approaches. The overall assessment of turbidity and sediment fluxes should also rely on the use and improvement of existing monitoring networks in coastal environments. Sediment fluxes assessment is a key point in order to investigate coastal morphological evolutions and/or habitat changes. Morphodynamics in urbanized areas has become a particularly sensitive topic under increased climate change stress (sea-level rise, wave climate change, modification in the hydraulic regime of drainage basins due to modified rainfall), but also under the stress of increased human impact (river management and damming, dredging, marine aggregate extraction, aquaculture, fishing, offshore renewable energy farms), which may all change sediment inputs from the continent and the conditions of sediment remobilisation and transport in the coastal zone. Moreover, fine sediments resuspension cannot be disconnected from the induced turbidity, hence from the primary production in coastal environments. In this document, the term “sediment fluxes” will thus be understood in the sense of i) long-shore or cross-shore sediment fluxes, from the continent to the shelf, ii) the related evolutions in bottom sedimentary coverage (links with the seafloor integrity), turbidity (links with the euphotic depth and primary production), and morphology (links with bathymetric and/or hydrodynamic changes, cf. coastal erosion issues).
Coordinateur IFREMER : Romaric Verney
Responsable local : François Bourrin
Financement : ANR Défi 1 : Gestion sobre des ressources et adaptation au changement climatique
