News
Thursday 28 September 2023
'Some more variation in nature restoration, please'
Shellfish, worms and other benthic animals that live in the turbulent bottom of the Wadden Sea and Delta, can take quite a beating when it comes to storms. "When restoring tidal nature, for example along the Westerschelde, we should therefore not…
Friday 22 September 2023
Harnessing and moving with natural forces in Zeeland's delta - Landscape plan wins Eo Wijers prize
The regional final of the Eo Wijers Prize Competition 2022-2023 for central Zeeland has been won by a collaboration of Bureau B+B urbanism and landscape architecture, RO&AD Architects and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ). In…
Monday 11 September 2023
'A crab is never just a crab'
A herring in the North Sea, a crab in the Wadden Sea or an anemone fish on a coral reef, ... biologists like to think in terms of individual species that all have their own place within food webs in ecosystems across the world. "But that is surely…
Monday 28 August 2023
Sustainable protection of rapidly subsiding coastlines with mangroves
Along the Asian coastlines there are many areas where rural communities experience alarming rates of sea level rises due to land subsidence up to 10 cm per year. This causes tremendous challenges on how to live there and protect these coasts. A…
Monday 28 August 2023
Shellfish on the run create unstable mudflats
The expected increase in extreme weather could make the bottom of tidal flats more unstable. That's shown by NIOZ researcher Zhengquan Zhou in the PhD-thesis he will defend at Utrecht University on September 7th. "With the increase in heat waves,…
Thursday 24 August 2023
Battle between land and sea obeys mathematical laws
The disappearance of nature in front of dikes in the pounding waves, as well as the return of resilient nature on the boundary of land and water, obey many more rules than one might think. Conservationists and nature managers who know these laws, can…
Thursday 24 August 2023
Pear trees teeming with fish and other sea life
Artificial reefs in the Wadden Sea, made from discarded pear trees are teeming with marine life after more than a year underwater. That's shown in experiments by Jon Dickson, PhD candidate at NIOZ. "After four months, we already saw lots of fish and…
Friday 18 August 2023
Calcifying algae as key players in climate models
Over the past 500 million years, different single-celled organisms in the oceans have discovered at different times and also under very different conditions how to build a ‘shell’ around their single cell. “Six different strategies under just as many…
Thursday 10 August 2023
Lake sediments suggest that the Horn of Africa reached a drought tipping point 11,700 years ago
‘Wet gets wetter, dry gets drier’. That mantra has been used for decennia to predict how global warming affects the hydrological cycle. Climate models predict that much of tropical Africa will enjoy a future with wetter weather. The question is why…
Wednesday 09 August 2023
Social distancing seals: an evolutionary response to pathogen transmission?
During the Covid-19 pandemic, many countries implemented social distancing measures, which significantly reduced transmission rates of the virus. Scientists at Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), Wageningen University & Research…
