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The coastal zone is amongst the most dynamic environments on the planet, but it is also facing great, and increasing, natural and anthropogenic pressure. This calls for better tools of prediction of coastal change. The inauguralCoastal Dynamics conferencewas held in 1994 in Barcelona, Spain, in response to the appearance of large field and laboratory data sets with which to test and validate numerical prediction tools. Since then, the international Coastal Dynamics conference series has become one of the most important meetings for scientists within the fields of nearshore dynamics and coastal evolution. After the meeting in Barcelona, conferences were held in Gdansk, Poland (1995); Plymouth, UK (1997); Lund, Sweden (2001); Barcelona (2005); Tokyo, Japan (2009); and Arcachon, France (2013). The Coastal Dynamics conference series advances the community’s understanding of recent basic and applied research concerning coastal waves and currents; interactions between wind, water, and sediments; and morphological changes in different environments (with and without structures) such as sandy, rocky, and muddy coasts, inlets, and estuaries. The conference documents research and applications treating these coastal dynamics at the short, medium, and large/long spatial and temporal scales of the climatic drivers and coastal responses. The 8th International Conference on Coastal Dynamics was held on June 12–16, 2017, in the city of Helsingør (Elsinore), Denmark. It was hosted jointly by the University of Copenhagen, the Danish Hydraulic Institute (DHI), the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), and the Danish Coastal Authority (DCA), and it was chaired by Per Sørensen, Aart Kroon, and Troels Aagaard. The conference was attended by 233 researchers from 23 countries. A total of approximately 300 abstracts were submitted for presentation at the conference and after peer review and selection by the international technical abstract committee, the conference comprised 143 oral and 37 poster presentations. The presentations were all associated with a full paper, which was published electronically in the conference proceedings volume. During the conference, three keynote lectures were presented by Dr. Edward Anthony, Dr. Peter Nielsen, and Dr. Nils Drønen. The conference also comprised two short courses on Shoreline Evolution Modelling and Climate Change and Coastal Adaptation, and a field trip was organized along the beaches of the North Zealand coast. The conference dinner was held at Hotel Marienlyst in Helsingør where the international organizing committee honoured Prof. Rob Holman with the Coastal Dynamics 2017 coastal award for his long and significant contribution to the field of coastal science. Before the conference, delegates were invited to contribute a full journal paper for publication in the Topical Collection in Ocean Dynamics. Amongst the positive respondents, 18 papers were selected on the basis of the impression made during the oral/poster presentation, the quality of the conference paper, and the scores/reviews from the abstract review committee. Following peer review and revision, 11 papers were finally included in this topical collection. The first three papers to be discussed consider coastal dynamics related to tidal dunes, shoreline evolution, and the swash zone. Doré et al. (2018) investigate tidal dune dynamics based on field observations, which show superimposed ripples on larger scale tidal dunes. Numerical modelling based on a 2D RANS (Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes) approach is applied at both small (ripple) and large (dune) scales, and in both cases, simulation results are reported to compare well Responsible Editor: Jörg-Olaf Wolff