BANX

Marine sand extraction is rapidly accelerating, with increasing amounts of sand needed for coastal nourishment, land reclamation, and the construction industry. The impact of depleting sand resources is already felt on the Belgian Continental Shelf, and is an emerging challenge on the Netherlands Continental Shelf. This poses a severe hazard to the environment, i.e. on sandbank morphology, which in turn affects ecology, while also threatening our access to sand supplies in the future. The BANX project aims to provide knowledge and tools to support the long-term management (years to decades) and sustainable exploitation of tidal sandbanks in such environments with sediment scarcity.