Marsh development and grazing at the Marker Wadden

Supervisor: Marloes van den Akker  (m.vandenakker@science.ru.nl)

Are you up for a challenge and have you always wanted to work on quick sand? Are you curious how the Marker Wadden look like? And are you interested in wetland development from scratch?

The Marker Wadden is a constructed archipelago with as aim the facilitation of the productivity and biodiversity in lake Markermeer. By developing reed marshes and shallow waters, the habitat heterogeneity of the lake will be increased, giving breeding and feeding grounds to several fish and bird species. The islands are purely build from silt and clay and are at the moment big pools of quick sand. Interesting questions are how reed plants will interact with the soil by stabilizing the quick sand conditions and altering the soil biochemistry and hydrology giving possibly opportunity to the establishment of other plants. Moreover, geese will play an important role as top down control of the marshes, leading to differences in marsh development.

In this internship, you are going to look at the short term effects of reed on the soil biogeochemistry and the effects of grazing on the marsh vegetation on the Marker Wadden. You will perform fieldwork and labwork and if time allows it, you can set-up a small scale greenhouse experiment.

Are you interested or do you have some questions? Feel free to contact me.

Start: as soon as possible.