David Hodgson, Anne Bernhardt, Michael Andrew Clare, Anne-Christine da Silva, Julie Fosdick, Barbara Mauz, Ivar Midtkandal, Amanda Owen, Brian Romans 

Technological advances make these exciting times for geoscientists studying Earth surface processes, their depositional products, and interactions with the biosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and lithosphere; from monitoring contemporary sediment transport processes to interpretation of sedimentary archives that record ancient environmental changes. We set out three research challenges: 1) Sedimentology and society; 2) Life and sediment interactions; 3) Sedimentary system responses to external forcings. Finally, we conclude our summaries of these cutting-edge research topics, with a rallying call for the sedimentology, stratigraphy, and diagenesis research communities to become integral to pertinent interdisciplinary research areas.

The open access journal Frontiers in Earth Science: Sedimentology, Stratigraphy, and Diagenesis (SSD) is a new vehicle to enable our discipline to continue to grow, and reinvigorate these research areas as core geoscience disciplines. We are ready to receive manuscripts from across the Sedimentology, Stratigraphy, and Diagenesis research community, within and beyond the themes we summarize below. We intend that these themes will form the basis for special sessions at conferences, and to accrue open access thematic sets in the journal, which will reflect the central position of SSD research in the geosciences, and across interdisciplinary research programmes.