Prof. Dr. Tjeerd Bouma

‘Learning from Mother Nature’

Specialization

Understanding coastal ecosystems for sustainable conservation & use.

Career

Since the start of his career, Tjeerd Bouma has shown a drive to do frontier applied research: i.e., gaining a fundamental understanding needed to resolve societal problems. During his PhD he did fundamental plant physiological research to identify those maintenance processes that caused the greatest reduction in crop yield (potatoes, tomatoes, and beans), to thereby enable targeted crop-breeding. As a post-doc, he continued this line of research on horticultural fruit trees (apples and oranges), while learning how to place his work in a more fundamental ecological context. When starting as tenure-track scientist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research NIOZ (former NIOO-CEME) he completely switched his research focus towards the ecology of intertidal and marine ecosystems.

Key ecosystems:
- Coastal vegetation, mangroves, salt marshes, seagrass meadows
- Benthic ecosystem engineers, mussels, oysters, endo-benthos
- Bio-engineering sea walls

In all research fields his work is still well cited.

Current research lines

Coasts and deltas belong to the most densely inhabited and intensively used areas in the world. The strong competition for space has led to large-scale loss of intertidal ecosystems, despite belonging to the most valuable systems in the world in terms of ecosystem services provided. This has fuelled a major interesting in ecosystem restoration for ecosystem services. The research team working with Tjeerd Bouma has hence focussed on understanding i) how to improve restoration practice, ii) how to sustainable benefit from ecosystem services, and iii) assessing the resilience of these valuable ecosystems to climate change.

• Restoration of intertidal ecosystems as mangroves, seagrasses and salt marshes often fail, due to strong physical drivers. To enhance restoration success, the research team working with Tjeerd Bouma has focussed on obtaining a fundamental understanding how natural systems establish (e.g., Balke et al. 2011 Mar Ecol Prog Ser. 440: 1–9, Balke et al. 2014 Journal of Ecology 102: 700-708), and translating this understanding into novel, large-scale applicable restoration concepts (e.g., Temmink et al. Nature Comm 11 Art# 3668; Fivash et al 2022 J Appl Ecol. 59: 1050-1059). This has led to the broad application of the Windows of Opportunity framework in improving coastal restoration and modelling natural dynamics of biogeomorphic systems (e.g., Hu et al 2021 Geophys Res Letters 48: e2021GL095596; Poppema et al 2019 Ocean Coast Manag. 168: 238-250).
• Ecosystem-services such as e.g., Nature-Based Flood Defense, carbon sequestration, supporting biodiversity, enabling aquaculture, recreation, etc., is a key driver of many restoration efforts. The research team working with Tjeerd Bouma focusses on fundamentally understanding the conditionality of services provisioning, as well as the extent that different services are compatible (i.e., win-win) vs. mutually exclusive (i.e., trade-off choice). Within the scientific community, he contributed to the broad acceptance of using tidal ecosystems as Nature-Based Flood Defense (e.g., Borsje et al 2011 Ecological Engineering 37: 113-122; Temmerman et al. 2013 Nature 504: 79-83). Novel insights in how nature-based flood defence by salt marshes work when a dike breaches (e.g., Zhu et al. 2020 Nature Sust. 10; 853), fuelled societal discussion on transitional polders as novel flood-defence system (12 debated articles in local news paper PZC). He actively worked on outreach to the broader public (see list below)
• Understanding the long-term climate resilience of ecosystems is a key prerequisite to effectively invest in ecosystem restoration for ecosystem services. To enable this line of research, the team working with Tjeerd Bouma has developed novel field-flume to quantify key parameters needed to feed into models (e.g., de Smit et al. 2020 Limnol. Oceanogr.: Methods 18, 585–598; de Smit et al. 2021 Limnol. Oceanogr. 9999, 1–12;  James et al. 2019 BioScience 69: 136–142; James et al. 2020 J. of Ecology 108; 2025-2037) and lab set-ups to study bioturbation behaviour under heat stress (e.g., Zhou et al. 2022. Science of the Total Environment 824, 153621).

Education & current positions

The key interest in carrying out fundamental research, that can be translated into application for the benefits of humanity, also translates into having a lector position at the HZ University of Applied Sciences next to academic positions at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) and Utrecht University. Researcher ID: A-9841-2011

Current positions:

• Coastal ecologist at NIOZ
• Lector at the University of Applied Sciences, Vlissingen
• Honorary Professor at Groningen University