Australasian Coasts & Ports - a 50 year legacy.

Australasian Coasts & Ports is a bi-annual conference series jointly hosted by Engineering Australia (through the National Committee for Coastal and Ocean Engineering), Engineering New Zealand (through the New Zealand Coastal Society) and PIANC Australia-New Zealand. The conference covers all topics related to coasts and ports including engineering, science, planning, environmental and management aspects. The conference series had its origins in 1973 when the First Australian Conference on Coastal Engineering was held in Manly, Sydney. The series continued generally bi-annually and in 1986 the First Australasian Port, Harbour & Offshore Engineering Conference was held in Sydney and was run in alternating years until 1995 when the two conferences were combined being renamed Coasts & Ports from 2001. The conferences have been run in major cities throughout Australasia until 2021 when Covid-related travel and gathering restrictions forced the conference to be held virtually in 2022. The focus of conference papers has evolved over the decades. A keyword analysis of over 2800 papers tracks the change in industry trends and focus through time with papers shifting from fundamentals of Waves, Beaches and Sediment in the 1970s to include Port, Design and Construction in the 1980s and Model and Dredging in the 1990s and 2000s. The 2010 to 2020s exhibited a greater variety of keywords with use of Coastal Structure, Numerical Model, Tsunami, Climate Change and Sea Level Rise increasing and Machine Learning added in 2021. These papers have been lead-authored by over 1400 distinct authors with over 30 people having lead-authored at least 10 papers and four lead-authoring over 15 papers. The papers presented at Coasts & Ports are unique, representing the current state of practice in Australasian coastal engineering and science at that point in time. The conference series has a strong focus on application, resulting in a bridging of the analysis (research) and synthesis (design and application) branches. This benefits the discipline by exposing practitioners to new research and researchers to current industry problems which may benefit from further research. While presentations are useful, full papers provide a lasting record of the subjects and issues of the time. The last 50 years of Coasts & Ports proceedings, including key papers still highly cited today, providing strong evidence of the benefits of this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]