Identifying efficient solutions to protect coastal regions from marine pollution requires expertise from a range of specialties and strategic approaches. This book gathers information on the impact of oil spills at a coastal level from different experts' points of view, identifying synergies between domains such as mathematics, numerical modeling, mechanics, biology, economics and law. The collaborative research presented here is based on the 4th International Workshop on Anti-Pollution and Marine Coastal Water Pollution, held in La Rochelle, France at the Engineering School EIGSI, in April 2012. The areas addressed include: materials and structures (fluid-structure and capture interaction, cable and membrane equations, optimization); coastal hydrodynamics (computational fluid dynamics, numerical analysis of shallow water equations, analytical and numerical derivatives); biological impacts (biology, multivariate analysis, indicators); and economics and law (compensation costs, insurance coverage, coastal vulnerability).

Understanding marine pollution and the contamination of coastal environments requires knowledge from a variety of scientific fields. Marine Environmental Quality promotes a multidisciplinary approach to investigations, drawing on not only natural sciences, but also applied mathematics and social sciences. The investigations in this book focus on both organic and inorganic pollutants, firstly in a study conducted in the city of La Rochelle, on the North Atlantic French coast, then expanding the areas under examination to regions of English and Portuguese waters and, lastly, to the Mediterranean Sea. The improvement such research can bring to biomarkers, models and experiments enables equal progress in the quality of seawater in ports and protected areas of coastal regions. The eight chapters of Marine Environmental Quality present many aspects of this research, including experiments with floating barriers, water governance in various areas, sampling sites and sentinel species that act as biomarkers in harbors. Also covered are environmental commitments, both international and local, the risk that marine contamination poses to human health, experimental designs for interactions with microplastics and a study biomonitoring the juveniles of sentinel species. Such results will bring many benefits, to human health, to economic inclusion and to regional development.