My PhD work at the Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) is about how sediment dynamics shape benthic communities in the intertidal, especially in newly created habitat for restoration initiatives. I investigated this topic with monitoring, field and lab experiments, and statistical modeling techniques. Read more about it below, or learn about my food web project in Chile or past salmon research.
Benthic macrofauna development in new tidal flats
The intertidal is one of the most challenging environments to live in. Marine invertebrates must withstand the switch from dry land to ocean twice a day, and the seesawing food availability, shelter, and predators that tides entail. Not only that, but estuaries are very dynamic environments, where environmental factors like salinity and nutrient import are constantly changing.
Coastal areas are some of the most densely populated and highly utilized areas on this earth and are also some of the most vulnerable to sea level rise. An alternative to the rising economic and ecological costs of sea wall is to implement natural defenses like salt marshes, tidal flats, and oyster reefs. These solutions are much less costly to maintain than sea walls and provide numerous ecological benefits. For example, tidal flats of the Netherlands is one of the biggest stopover places for bird migration in the world. The also provide carbon sequestration and are nursery habitats for fish.
A key component of tidal flat ecosystems are benthic, or bottom-dwelling, macrofauna, invertebrates such as clams and worms. These animals engineer their environment by eroding or trapping sediments, driving oxygen and nutrient fluxes, increasing denitrification and microbial activity. They are also food for higher trophic levels like birds and fish. Because of their key position in intertidal ecosystems, it is important to know how benthic macrofauna communities will develop not only as these new tidal flats are colonized, but are created.
Cerastoderma edule is an important ecosystem engineer and food for birds.
I want to learn more about how sediment dynamics shape macrofaunal communities. I’m researching factors like sediment compaction and depth and how these drive macrofaunal behavior, but also recruitment and community development. I also investigate various macrofauna sensitivities to erosion, which is an important and possibly limiting factor to their survival in soft eroding tidal flats, especially as storms become more frequent with climate change.
This knowledge will help us not only understand how we can better engineer restoration and coastal protection projects to encourage the development of desirable macrofaunal communities, but it will also help explain complex animal-sediment interactions that occur on tidal flats and how resilient benthic macrofaunal communities are in the face of climate change.
I’m gathering some Limecola balthica for experiments.
A tidal flat on the Oosterschelde, Netherlands