The 8th IAHR International Symposium on Hydraulic Structures (ISHS2020) was scheduled to take place on 12-15 May 2020 in Santiago, Chile. Because of exceptional circumstances, i.e. the COVID-19 virus pandemic, the event had to be cancelled in late March 2020. With the agreement of the symposium organisation and contributors, the peer-reviewed technical papers were published in the ISH2020 proceedings, available open access and uniquely identified by a digital identifier called DOI.

The scope of the ISHS2020 Proceedings is broad, with one study on fluvial hydraulics, one on coastal hydraulics, eleven on spillway hydraulics, three on culvert hydrodynamics and seventeen on hydraulic structures more broadly. The topics encompasses advanced multidisciplinary subjects such as air-water flows, sediment processes and fish passage. The papers of the Proceedings include contributions on experimental and numerical modelling, as well as combined approaches embedding more than two or more methodologies, e.g., hybrid modelling. Altogether the Proceedings regroups twenty-one physical studies, eleven numerical investigations, including ten computational fluid dynamics (CFD) studies, and two field studies. Furthermore, several contributions embed two or more approaches. Without a doubt, hydraulic structures bring new challenges as well as solutions directly relevant to the broad hydraulic engineering community.

For more description of this proceedings, please refer to an article, also included in this collection, titled "Hydraulic Structures: Challenges, Diversity, Ecology, Energy Dissipation, Hydrodynamics of the 21st Century" by Robert Janssen, Hubert Chanson, and Jose M. Adriasola.