“…However, river‐borne terrestrial materials being carried to oceans have been changed substantially by intensive human activities such as dam construction, fertilizer use, and water withdrawal (Milliman & Farnsworth, ; Syvitski et al, ); this inevitably influences the ecological environment of estuarine‐inner shelf areas (Tong et al, ; Wang et al, ; Yang et al, ; Zhang et al, ). The sedimentary environment in these regions has also changed, resulting in coarsening surface sediments (Luo et al, ; Yang et al, ), and erosion‐driven coastal retreat (Bentley et al, ; Darby et al, ; Nyberg et al, ; Ogston et al, ; Rahman et al, ), while increasingly serious human‐induced pollution in river catchments potentially influences coastal oceans (Gregg et al, ; Wang et al, ). Overall, human activities have changed the “source to sink” transportation processes of terrigenous materials, similarly influencing the distribution, transport, and burial of PAHs in river catchment‐estuary‐shelf systems.…”