Building for nature- biodiversity on dikes
The Netherlands have been building dikes to protect their country from flooding events for a long time. Although the province of Zeeland is currently well protected with dikes along its estuaries, these regularly need to be replaced or reinforced. Currently, dikes and foreshores are primarily designed from a civil engineering perspective. The main focus is on flood protection and water management. The Building for Nature approach aims at innovating the design of coastal protection structures in order to increase their nature values. Dikes with this type of design are called rich dikes, or rich revetments. These revetments can be of more interest to other users such as divers, fishermen or aquaculture.
In Spring 2015 a dike section of 100m along the Eastern Scheldt at Sint-Annaland (Tholen, Zeeland) was used as a test site for new revetment designs. Here, concrete blocks with surfaces with different sizes of pits (holes) were compared with other, more traditional revetment types. To study the impact of winter storms, every early spring the seaweeds are removed from part of each of the revetment types studied. In this project you will monitor the changes in biodiversity and you will assess which block type performs better and why. Based on your analysis you provide advice on the design of new revetments.
Research type: Field work and desk analysis
Research level: Minor or Internship
Prerequisite: Interest in aquatic ecology
Partners: Rijkswaterstaat
Client: Tim van Oijen