Many European bridge structures are decades old and need to be refurbished, or even to be replaced. However, the high financial investment hinders this, making the extension of their service life the only available choice in the short term. Recognizing and assessing current risk, reducing vulnerabilities through appropriate actions and monitoring the behavior of these structures are thus possible immediate routes to solve this problem.

This special issue of the Journal of Civil Structural Health Monitoring provides some contributions from the 1st Conference of the European Association on Quality Control of Bridges and Structures—EUROSTRUCT2021, held in Padova (Italy), where an international forum emerged for promoting the worldwide exchange of knowledge and experience in quality control and improvement of bridges and structures. EuroStruct emerged from COST Action TU146 “Quality specifications for roadway bridges, standardization at a European level (BridgeSpec)”, which aimed to achieve the European economic and societal needs by standardizing the condition assessment and maintenance level of roadway bridges.

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is seen as one of the key strategies with a great potential to support the informed management of transport infrastructures.

The goal of this special issue is to gather recent theoretical and applied developments in the domain of SHM with applications to bridges.