Sandy beaches constitute a key ecosystem and provide socioeconomic goods and services, thereby playing an important role in the maintenance of human populations and in biodiversity conservation. Despite the ecological and social importance of these ecosytems, Brazilian sandy beaches are significantly impacted by human interference, chemical and organic pollution and tourism, as well as global climate change. These factors drive the need to better understand the environmental change and its consequences for biota. To promote the implementation of integrated studies to detect the effects of regional and global environmental change on beaches and on other benthic habitats of the Brazilian coast, Brazilian marine researchers have established The Coastal Benthic Habitats Monitoring Network (ReBentos). In order to provide input for sample planning by ReBentos, we have conducted an intensive review of the studies conducted on Brazilian beaches and summarized the current knowledge about this environment. In this paper, we present the results of this review and describe the physical, biological and socioeconomics features of Brazilian beaches. We have used these results, our personal experience and worldwide literature to identify research projects that should be prioritized in the assessment of regional and global change on Brazilian sandy beaches. We trust that this paper will provide insights for future studies and represent a significant step towards the conservation of Brazilian beaches and their biodiversity.

Climate change is predicted to lead to more extreme weather events, including changes to storm frequency, intensity and location. Yet the ecological responses to storms are incompletely understood for sandy shorelines, the globe’s longest land-ocean interface. Here we document how storms of different magnitude impacted the invertebrate assemblages on a tidal flat in Brazil. We specifically tested the relationships between wave energy and spatial heterogeneity, both for habitat properties (habitat heterogeneity) and fauna (β-diversity), predicting that larger storms redistribute sediments and hence lead to spatially less variable faunal assemblages. The sediment matrix tended to become less heterogeneous across the flat after high-energy wave events, whereas β-diversity increased after storms. This higher β-diversity was primarily driven by species losses. Significantly fewer species at a significantly lower density occurred within days to weeks after storms. Negative density and biomass responses to storm events were most prominent in crustaceans. Invertebrate assemblages appeared to recover within a short time (weeks to months) after storms, highlighting that most species typical of sedimentary shorelines are, to some degree, resilient to short-term changes in wave energy. Given that storm frequency and intensity are predicted to change in the coming decades, identifying properties that determine resilience and recovery of ecosystems constitute a research priority for sedimentary shorelines and beyond.

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