Sanne Vaassen

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I am a PhD Candidate at the University of Auckland (New Zealand), funded under the Future Coasts Aotearoa Programme (NIWA).
With my research, I aim to take the next steps in understanding changing coastal wetlands as a result of climate change in New Zealand estuaries. Thereby, I mainly focus on mangrove expansion and encroachment in already existing wetland systems like saltmarshes and seagrass systems.
About a 100 years ago mangroves were very rare, and now you can find them everywhere on the North Island. My job is to shed some more light on this phenomenon, and to find out how this expansion will change coastal ecosystems and morphodynamics on estuarine scale.

Before I travelled to New Zealand, I did my masters in Marine Sciences at the University of Utrecht. During my thesis I got the opportunity to dive deeper into the ways in which coastal ecosystems affect geomorphodynamics. I modelled seagrasses and lugworms in the context of a Wadden Sea tidal basin. A project during which I got familiar with modeling in Delft3D and did some extensive coding in MATLAB.