Sedimentology has seen many significant advances and changes over the past 40 years, ranging from facies modelling to sequence stratigraphy; chemostratigraphy to basin analysis; and the integration of studies of physical, chemical and, increasingly, biological processes in the interpretation and prediction of sedimentary environments and products. The subject is becoming ever more interdisciplinary and applied, and now has far more links to other physical sciences. Research and debate are continuing afresh as we move into this new interdisciplinary phase and promise many developments and increased uses of our subject. Now seemed a good time to publish a series of review papers concerning some key current areas of research. We hope that these papers will provide comprehensive starting points for those wishing to become acquainted with an area, act as stimuli for debate, and provide awareness and ideas for future research avenues. No issue of this sort can, of course, ever be truly comprehensive in its coverage: these reviews concern only selected snippets from the wide scope of sedimentology and each has, of necessity, been selective in its own area.

Fluvial-Tidal Sedimentology provides information on the 'Tidal-Fluvial Transition', the transition zone between river and tidal environments, and includes contributions that address some of the most fundamental research questions, including how the morphology of the tidal-fluvial transition zone evolves over short (days) and long (decadal) time periods and for different tidal and fluvial regimes, the structure of the river flow as it varies in its magnitude over tidal currents and how this changes at the mixing interface between fresh and saline water and at the turbidity maximum, the role of suspended sediment in controlling bathymetric change and bar growth and the role of fine-grained sediment (muds and flocs), whether it is possible to differentiate between 'fluvial' and 'tidally' influenced bedforms as preserved in bars and within the adjacent floodplain and what are the diagnostic sedimentary facies of tidal-fluvial deposits and how are these different from 'pure' fluvial and tidal deposits, amongst other topics. The book presents the latest research on the processes and deposits of the tidal-fluvial transition, documenting recent major field programs that have quantified the flow, sediment transport, and bed morphology in tidal-fluvial zones. It uses description of contemporary environments and ancient outcrop analogues to characterize the facies change through the tidal-fluvial transition.