The department of Coastal Systems (COS) at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research is looking for two motivated PhD candidates to fulfil a 4-year position. Both positions will be part of the NWO-funded Vici-project “Engineering emergent trait-based mimics to restore coastal ecosystems”. The aim of the positions will be to co-develop and experimentally test naturally degradable structures that facilitate the restoration of habitat-forming species, such as salt marsh plants, seagrasses, and reef-forming worms and bivalves as part of a multi-disciplinary research team. The first PhD-position will focus on restoration of coastal reefs, while the second will work with coastal vegetation. Both positions are within the group of Prof. T. van der Heide (NIOZ).
THE INSTITUTE
NWO-NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research is the national oceanographic research institute. The mission of NIOZ is to perform academically excellent multidisciplinary fundamental and frontier-applied marine research addressing important scientific and societal questions pertinent to the functioning of oceans and seas. NIOZ also serves as national marine research facilitator (NMF) for The Netherlands scientific community, and stimulates and supports national and international marine research, marine education programs and marine policy development.
THE DEPARTMENT
COS examines how physical, chemical and biological processes interact to determine the distribution, composition and productivity of marine species - from primary producers to top predators - and marine habitats - from the coast to inter/sub-tidal and pelagic environments. Research is applied at both the regional and global scales to develop knowledge and methods needed for climate adaptation and mitigation and for biodiversity protection and restoration.
THE PROJECT
Coastal ecosystems that are shaped by habitat-forming species (so-called ‘biogenic ecosystems’), such as salt marsh plants, seagrasses, and reef-forming worms and bivalves provide vital services but are rapidly declining worldwide. Supported by the UN’s call to action in the ‘Decade on Restoration’ and ‘EU Nature Restoration Law’, governments, industry and nature organizations have increasingly embraced restoration as a vital tool to halt and reverse ecosystem losses. Unfortunately, restoration of biogenic ecosystems is failure-prone, because their stability hinges on self-facilitation generated by ‘emergent traits’, such as dense sediment-stabilizing root mats or strong and persistent reef structures. Such traits emerge when habitat formers aggregate, causing self-facilitation to only work beyond certain minimum patch size and density thresholds. This creates a ‘chicken-and-egg problem’ when ecosystem restoration is attempted on degraded systems. In this project, a multidisciplinary research team will test a new framework that combines methods from ecology, industrial design, and engineering to develop biodegradable or erodible structures that temporarily mimic key emergent traits using industrial-scale additive manufacturing (i.e., 3D-printing) techniques. The resulting prototype mimics should ‘kick-start’ establishment of the target habitat-modifying species, after which they are allowed to naturally degrade. Within the team, the role of both PhD candidates will be to (1) assist in the development of new prototype mimics, (2) explore the environmental conditions under which these mimics can be usefully applied using remote sensing analyses, and (3) test the performance of competing prototype mimics in field experiments – both nationally and internationally.
