项目介绍

2026年10月1日

Are you fascinated by how water, sediment and vegetation shape coastal landscapes? Would you like to use numerical models to reconstruct the formation and flooding of peat landscapes during the Holocene, to better understand coastal landscape development under future sea-level rise? And are you eager to work in an interdisciplinary research team? Then this PhD position may be for you!

Zeeland is a low-lying coastal province in the south-western part of the Netherlands. During the Holocene, large parts of the region developed into an extensive peat landscape. Following a combination of sea-level rise, natural landscape dynamics and human land use, this landscape was flooded and transformed into the tidal environment it is today.

As a PhD candidate, you will investigate the processes behind these major landscape changes. You will translate existing geological records and paleo-tidal reconstructions into morphological and hydrodynamic boundary conditions for new numerical model simulations. In turn, you will validate the simulated coastal landscape development with the available paleo-records.

You will work with numerical models such as Delft3D, to capture interactions between hydrodynamics, sediment transport, morphology, and peat dynamics. The model studies will help to unravel how these bio-physical interactions have, over centuries to millennia, formed the Zeeland peat landscape and caused its subsequent rapid flooding.

This PhD position is part of Re-Flex Zeeland, an interdisciplinary project funded by the Delta Climate Center. The project brings together Wageningen University, Utrecht University, the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), and regional partners. Although the project focuses on Zeeland, it addresses internationally relevant questions about the resilience and vulnerability of low-lying deltas under sea-level rise, land subsidence and human intervention.

Within the Re-Flex Zeeland project, you will collaborate closely with another PhD candidate working on geological and vegetation reconstructions, and with a postdoctoral researcher developing three-dimensional visualizations of the past landscapes.

Your duties and responsibilities include:

• developing, calibrating and evaluating numerical models that couple hydrodynamics, sediment transport, morphology and vegetation dynamics;
• translating geological and paleo-tidal reconstructions into model configurations;
• designing numerical experiments to investigate the formation and flooding of coastal peat landscapes;
• collaborating with researchers at Wageningen University, Utrecht University, NIOZ and the Delta Climate Center;
• publishing your findings in scientific journals and presenting them at international conferences;
• supervising BSc and MSc thesis students, and contributing to field excursions in Zeeland as part of BSc and MSc education;
• completing a PhD thesis.

You will work here
We are the Hydrology and Environmental Hydraulics Group (HWM), a dynamic and committed team of academics, support staff, postdocs and PhD researchers. Our focus is on hydrology and environmental hydraulics, which we combine to understand and quantify hydrological processes in catchments, aquifers, rivers and deltas. We develop novel sensing techniques, create models and perform field and lab experiments to advance process understanding.

You will be supervised by Roeland van de Vijsel and Ton Hoitink, and will work closely together with other researchers in the Re-Flex Zeeland project.

Your working time will be divided between Wageningen University, and the Delta Climate Center in Vlissingen, a coastal city in Zeeland. The exact balance will be agreed at the start of the appointment. Regular presence at both locations and travel between them will be expected.