About Pim Willemsen
Climate change increases the risk of flooding of deltas worldwide, whilst biodiversity is declining. Traditional engineering solutions for flood protection form hard boundaries in coastal ecosystems, designed according to abiotic knowledge. Pim’s work focusses on the fascinating feedback between waves, tides, morphology and ecology in deltas estuaries and shallow seas.
I am driven by going outside to the field, looking at landscape development and the processes that play a role in this development. I am convinced we can have a more sustainable future by relying on ecosystems and a naturally functioning system to provide climate change adaptation and mitigation while enabling biological diversity. Accordingly, we need to integrate ecology in coastal engineering.
Pim Willemsen
By training (University of Twente) Pim is a Civil Engineer with a specialization in Water Engineering and Management (MSc). During his Master thesis (National University of Singapore) he became fascinated by coastal wetlands. During his PhD (NIOZ, University of Twente) and postdoc research (University of Twente, Wageningen University) he further specialized in biogeomorphology of estuaries, deltas and shallow seas (tidal flats, salt marshes, mangroves) and how they function in Nature-based Solutions and provide Ecosystem Services. He aims at bringing scientific advances directly to application at Deltares. He likes working in this dynamic and multidisciplinary environment. He applies a range of methods and disciplines, including historical data analysis, conducting field measurements and flume studies, and process-based and simple numerical models.
Above all, he likes to bring researchers and advisors from different disciplines together to gain relevant knowledge for societal issues. Within Deltares his work contributes to a range of moonshots, including liveable deltas, making the world’s population safer from flooding, healthy water and subsurface systems and resilient infrastructure.
- Mangrove studies, for example related to sediment trapping capacity in urban mangroves in Singapore
- His contribution to understanding carbon fluxes in mangroves in Vietnam
- The development of the salt marsh Marconi near Delfzijl in the Ems-Dollard estuary
- Carbon in salt marshes in the EU Rest-Coast project
- Contribution to the development of the NBS-Dynamics module in D- Flow-Flexible Mesh
- The recent Delta Flume experiment with salt marsh vegetation, a news item of the project was made, which you can watch via this link
- Obtaining an NWO VENI grant for climate change adaptation and mitigation by salt marshes in Nature-based Solutions, executed at Wageningen University with Deltares as one of the main partners
Pim is a very accessible colleague, driven by curiosity, and always open to explore new ideas.