Proposed engineering projects in the Amazon Basin would disrupt sediment supplies to lowland rivers. Landsat imagery of Amazonian tributaries reveals that lower sediment loads are associated with lower meander migration and cutoff rates. The role of externally imposed sediment supplies on the evolution of meandering rivers and their floodplains is poorly understood, despite analytical advances in our physical understanding of river meandering1,2. The Amazon river basin hosts tributaries that are largely unaffected by engineering controls and hold a range of sediment loads, allowing us to explore the influence that sediment supply has on river evolution. Here we calculate average annual rates of meander migration within 20 reaches in the Amazon Basin from Landsat imagery spanning 1985–2013. We find that rivers with high sediment loads experience annual migration rates that are higher than those of rivers with lower sediment loads. Meander cutoff also occurs more frequently along rivers with higher sediment loads. Differences in meander migration and cutoff rates between the study reaches are not explained by differences in channel slope or river discharge. Because faster meander migration and higher cutoff rates lead to increased sediment-storage space in the resulting oxbows, we suggest that sediment supply modulates the reshaping of floodplain environments by meandering rivers. We conclude that imposed sediment loads influence planform changes in lowland rivers across the Amazon.

The concept of resilience has taken root in the discourse of environmental management, especially regarding Building with Nature strategies for embedding natural physical and ecological dynamics into engineered interventions in developed coastal zones. Resilience is seen as a desirable quality, and coastal management policy and practice are increasingly aimed at maximising it. Despite its ubiquity, resilience remains ambiguous and poorly defined in management contexts. What is coastal resilience? And what does it mean in settings where natural environmental dynamics have been supplanted by human-dominated systems? Here, we revisit the complexities of coastal resilience as a concept, a term, and a prospective goal for environmental management. We consider examples of resilience in natural and built coastal environments, and offer a revised, formal definition of coastal resilience with a holistic scope and emphasis on systemic functionality: “Coastal resilience is the capacity of the socioeconomic and natural systems in the coastal environment to cope with disturbances, induced by factors such as sea level rise, extreme events and human impacts, by adapting whilst maintaining their essential functions.” Against a backdrop of climate change impacts, achieving both socioeconomic and natural resilience in coastal environments in the long-term (>50 years) is very costly. Cost trade-offs among management aims and objectives mean that enhancement of socioeconomic resilience typically comes at the expense of natural resilience, and vice versa. We suggest that for practical purposes, optimising resilience might be a more realistic goal of coastal zone management.

Sinuous patterns traced by fluid flows are a ubiquitous feature of physical landscapes on Earth, Mars, the volcanic floodplains of the Moon and Venus, and other planetary bodies. Typically discussed as a consequence of migration processes in meandering rivers, sinuosity is also expressed in channel types that show little or no indication of meandering. Sinuosity is sometimes described as “inherited” from a preexisting morphology, which still does not explain where the inherited sinuosity came from. For a phenomenon so universal as sinuosity, existing models of channelized flows do not explain the occurrence of sinuosity in the full variety of settings in which it manifests, or how sinuosity may originate. Here we present a generic theory for sinuous flow patterns in landscapes. Using observations from nature and a numerical model of flow routing, we propose that flow resistance (representing landscape roughness attributable to topography or vegetation density) relative to surface slope exerts a fundamental control on channel sinuosity that is effectively independent of internal flow dynamics. Resistance-dominated surfaces produce channels with higher sinuosity than those of slope-dominated surfaces because increased resistance impedes downslope flow. Not limited to rivers, the hypothesis we explore pertains to sinuosity as a geomorphic pattern. The explanation we propose is inclusive enough to account for a wide variety of sinuous channel types in nature, and can serve as an analytical tool for determining the sinuosity a landscape might support.

Sea‐level rise along low‐lying coasts of the world's passive continental margins should, on average, drive net shoreline retreat over large spatial scales (>10² km). A variety of natural physical factors can influence trends of shoreline erosion and accretion, but trends in recent rates of shoreline change along the U.S. Atlantic Coast reflect an especially puzzling increase in accretion, not erosion. A plausible explanation for the apparent disconnect between environmental forcing and shoreline response along the U.S. Atlantic Coast is the application, since the 1960s, of beach nourishment as the predominant form of mitigation against chronic coastal erosion. Using U.S. Geological Survey shoreline records from 1830–2007 spanning more than 2,500 km of the U.S. Atlantic Coast, we calculate a mean rate of shoreline change, prior to 1960, of −55 cm/year (a negative rate denotes erosion). After 1960, the mean rate reverses to approximately +5 cm/year, indicating widespread apparent accretion despite steady (and, in some places, accelerated) sea‐level rise over the same period. Cumulative sediment input from decades of beach‐nourishment projects may have sufficiently altered shoreline position to mask “true” rates of shoreline change. Our analysis suggests that long‐term rates of shoreline change typically used to assess coastal hazard may be systematically underestimated. We also suggest that the overall effect of beach nourishment along of the U.S. Atlantic Coast is extensive enough to constitute a quantitative signature of coastal geoengineering and may serve as a bellwether for nourishment‐dominated shorelines elsewhere in the world.