Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Coastal and Estuarine Studies, Volume 42.

Once again I have the privilege and satisfaction of prefacing a monograph dedicated to cohesive sediments, based on presentations at the Nearshore and Estuarine Cohesive Sediment Transport Workshop held in St. Petersburg, Florida in April, 1991. This meeting was subtitled — "with Special Reference to Episodic Signatures." May I say a few words apropos "episodic", whose received meaning is storm-induced, yet only two of the thirty-two contributions have "episodic" in their titles and, in fact, barring a few notable exceptions, most papers make no explicit reference to influences of oceanographic forcing having periodicities that differ from those that are astronomically induced or are wind-wave dependent. When time came for me to take stock of the themes in the contributions in re my initial selection of the focus on episodic signatures, I came to the realization that as scientists we must obviously recognize the role of wide ranging frequencies in governing coastal sediment transport in general, and therefore in that context of course the entire volume is devoted to "episodic" effects in one way or another.