PhD candidate “Effects of nature-based SALTISolutions on estuarine ecosystem engineering”

Sea level rise, drought, subsidence, and dredging of waterways can exacerbate the intrusion of seawater in deltas and estuaries, affecting fresh water availability and nature. Within the large NWO-funded research programme SALTISolutions, we aim to gain insight in the mechanisms of salt water intrusion, and to investigate potential measures to mitigate the effects of salinity intrusion, including nature-based solutions.

In this PhD project, which will be an integral part of SALTISolutions, you will study the potential effects of such nature-based solutions on other estuarine services, such as habitat provision (and biodiversity) and safety from flooding, on top of the ability of these measures to mitigate salinity intrusion. The focus is on so-called "ecosystem engineering species" i.e., organisms, such as wetland plants and bivalves, that modify their abiotic environment via their physical structures or activity. You will study the effects of nature-based salinity intrusion measures on the estuarine scale, via the interplay between salinity, hydrodynamics, sediment transport, morphodynamics and ecosystem engineering activity. The main focus will be on contrasting traits of ecosystem engineering species (e.g. dense versus sparse vegetation and smooth versus rough shellfish reefs). You will adopt a combination of numerical hydrodynamic modelling, satellite remote sensing, statistical modelling and available data from field surveys. You will present the results at conferences and write your findings in journal papers and a PhD thesis.

The PhD-project is a collaboration between the Marine and Fluvial Systems (MFS) group at the Department of Civil Engineering of the Faculty of Engineering Technology, and the Department of Water Resources (WRS) of the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) of the University of Twente. You will be supervised by a joint team from these two groups.