From June 10 to 13, 2025, the city of Rende hosted the 16th GeoSed Congress at the University of Calabria, a major national event organized by the Italian Sedimentological Group (Gruppo Italiano di Sedimentologia – G.I.S.). The congress brought together geoscientists and sedimentology experts from across Italy and beyond to share recent advancements and multidisciplinary perspectives in sedimentary geology. Among the highlights of this edition was the active participation of the BERMS Project, which presented its first research outcomes to the scientific community.

The BERMS team contributed to the congress with both a poster session and an oral presentation, showcasing the preliminary findings of the project. These contributions underscored the project’s central goal: developing innovative, integrative methodologies to assess beach dynamics and erosion susceptibility along Mediterranean coasts.

The oral presentation, delivered by Prof. Francesca Micheletti from the University of Bari Aldo Moro, was titled "Petrographic Insights into Coastal Sediment Dynamics: A Multidisciplinary Study from the Sibari Site (BERMS Project)." It focused on the Sibari coastal system, located in the northern Ionian Sea (Calabria), which serves as one of the key study sites within BERMS. The talk highlighted the use of petrographic and compositional analyses to trace sediment sources, sediment transport mechanisms, and their influence on coastal morphology. By integrating these data with geophysical surveys and geomorphological mapping, the study offered new insights into sediment budgets and erosion vulnerability specific to Sibari—an area increasingly impacted by both natural forces and human activities.

Complementing this, the poster presentation by PhD Candidate Teresa Fracchiolla, titled "Integrating Multidisciplinary Approaches to Assess Beach Dynamics and Erosion Susceptibility: The BERMS Project" further illustrated the BERMS project’s multidisciplinary framework, which combines sedimentological, geophysical, ecological, and modeling approaches. With field investigations across three representative sites—Torre Guaceto, Porto Cesareo, and Sibari—the project aims to create a replicable toolkit for long-term monitoring and coastal management. The poster emphasized the integration of ground-based data with numerical modeling (using Delft3D software), aiming to support evidence-based strategies for environmental conservation and sustainable development in fragile coastal zones.

Participation in GeoSed 2025 offered the BERMS team an important opportunity to engage with the broader geoscience community, gather feedback, and foster future collaborations. As the project continues to evolve, these early results mark a significant step toward building scalable, science-driven solutions for managing sediment dynamics and mitigating coastal erosion in the Mediterranean basin.

All abstracts presented at the congress, including those by the BERMS team, are published in the official GeoSed 2025 abstract book, which is available online and freely accessible via DOI: https://doi.org/10.13126/unical.it/digital/geosed2025.