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Abstract: The main objective of the Conscience project was to develop and test concepts, guidelines and tools for the sustainable management of erosion along the European coastline, based on the best available scientific knowledge and on existing practical experience. Four concepts are potentially capable of providing the nexus between scientific knowledge and management: coastal resilience, coastal sediment cell, favourable sediment status and strategic sediment reservoir. The project has tested the use of these concepts and found that they are useful, provided that they are positioned and linked within a logical structure that we shall call the Conscience “Frame of Reference”, defined in time and space and supported through data and monitoring. Practical experience in six coastal sites in Europe has shown that the use of this Frame of Reference together with these concepts can make management objectives explicit and transparent. It can therefore support the design of an appropriate, resilience based coastal erosion management practice. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Mountain ecosystems are currently experiencing the strongest climatic warming and the largest changes in land-use during the last millennia. The impacts of these changes on soils and their roles in the cycling of carbon and nutrients are, however, largely unknown. Here, we define mountain soils as soils from mountainous areas with cool summers and cold winters and thus, soils from ecosystems that are influenced by snow and ice and where biogeochemical processes are limited by temperature. Because climatic conditions, soil properties, plant species and productivity vary at a small scale in mountains, they provide a unique natural but a seldom used laboratory to study soil processes. In this special issue, we compile different studies on soils from European mountains, reaching from the functioning of mountain soils along natural climatic gradients to responses of greenhouse gas fluxes from mountain soils to experimental warming, soil frost and changes in precipitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]