The Berau delta and barrier reef system, East Kalimantan, Indonesia, represents a complex coastal system with a variety of coastal landforms. This project focuses on studying the conditions under which the estuary acts as either a trap or a conduit of sediment. Given the river discharge and sediment supply from the Berau drainage basin, the actual flow and sediment transport through the tidal river, the estuary and the coastal shelf towards the coral reefs can be estimated. read more

The objective of this project is to understand the short- to long-term behavior of bar and rip patterns on the beach. This is done by monthly surveying the beach morphology, describing and doing morphometric analysis of the intertidal bar morphology using the ARGUS video images of Noordwijk and Egmond aan Zee in the Netherlands. read more

Mussel beds are important biogenic structures in the intertidal and subtidal environment of the (Dutch) Wadden Sea. Mussel beds are partly able to stabilize the substrate of the Wadden Sea, to improve the water quality, to establish important habitats for many (benthic) species and to provide food for water birds and other organisms. The coastal research group of Utrecht University will focus on the physical/hydrodynamical processes and conditions that can play a decisive role in the development of stable mussel beds. read more

Nearshore sandbars (alongshore ridges of sand in 2 - 10 m water depth typical of microtidal, storm-dominated coasts) serve as a natural protection for beaches by causing waves to break away from the shoreline. Cross-shore sandbar behavior is governed by the feedback between nonlinear hydrodynamics, sediment transport and the sandbar itself. Predictions of sandbar behavior with sophisticated numerical models are inherently uncertain because of a sensitive dependence on initial conditions and model inadequacies. This project aims to quantify these uncertainties and to determine its relevant source by means of embedding the traditional single-forecasts in a probabilistic (ensemble) environment and ensemble data-assimilation techniques. read more