Former Melioration Engineering students from the University of Rostock, now living all over Germany, used their 40th seminar group anniversary 2016 to visit the DredgDikes research dike.

Prof. Dr. hab. inz. Zbigniew Sikora passed away on 12 May 2015. The project DredgDikes expresses sympathy and shares the sorrow with his family and friends.

On December 8, 2014 the final DredgDikes workshop took place in the Steigenberger Hotel Sonne in Rostock. The project consortium would like to thank all those that contributed to the project during its 4 year lifetime.

In September 2014 the final investigation for chemical soil analyses at the German test dike and pilot dike were carried out. As expected the result so far show the need for the monitoring of the salt and nutrient ions if dredged material shall be applied. The monitoring of the vegetation development shows that within one year at all different deedged materials a good turf will establish.

The dredged material seminar which took place in Rostock, 24 to 25 September 2014 was again a great success. This conference is an established event and is organized by the Steinbeis Transfer Centre of Applied Landscape Planning under the auspices of the technical committee on dredged material of the HTG and the University of Rostock

During the 3rd Mini-Call of the South Baltic Programme the DredgDikes project successfully applied for additional funding to perform investigations in Denmark. The marine investigations company Orbicon from Roskilde was contracted to take samples from six locations in the Danish Zealand region.

In the fist week of September 2014 joint forces of Gdansk University of Technology and Rostock University performed one-week of overtopping experiments at the Polish DredgDikes research dike. We have studied the erosion process on a substantially different dike construction, compared to the German research dike.

In the week of 1 to 5 September 2014 Dr. Zielinski from Gdansk, who has been working at the Strathclyde University in Glasgow until recently and being a well-known specialist for geophysical methods to detect cracks in embankments, is performing 3D electical resistivity tomography (ERT) measurements on the German DredgDikes research dike.

Based on the experience from the research and pilot dikes regarding inhomogeneities of the dreged materials, the quality control using the degree of compaction is difficult. Particularly the high variation of local water contents in the installed materials are problematic. Therefore, an additional installation testing field was prepared in Rostock.

The South Baltic Conference on New Technologies and Recent Developments in Flood Protection which took place in Gdansk, 5-6 June 2014 was a great success. 145 participants from 6 European countries took part to discuss the interesting presentations.