PhD-students:
Peter Müller
Peter is in the third year of his PhD-project. He is working in the INTERFACE project and his main research topics are the effects of salt marsh management, namely drainage and grazing, on carbon sequestration in Wadden Sea salt marshes. Previously, he studied bio-geochemistry in salt marshes of the Chesapeake Bay at the SERC.
Hai Do Thi
Hai is a PhD-student from Vietnam. She is working on her PhD-project since 2014 and is another member of the INTERFACE team. She studies the origin of organic Carbon in salt marsh soils and, in collaboration with Julia Friese, wants to find out whether fish found in salt marsh creeks are part of the marsh food web. To answer these questions she mainly uses stable isotope approaches.
Dennis Schulze
Dennis started his PhD-project in 2015 by studying the effects of grazing on sediment deposition and accretion on the Hallig Langeness in collaboration with the WWF. The small island Langeness in the Wadden Sea is threatened by sea-level rise, as sediment transport onto the island is limited. He will now continue studying such bio-geomorphological feedback in the recently started WAMM-project. He will create numerical and hydrodynamic models to predict future marsh development in collaboration with Stijn Temmerman (University of Antwerp). Additionally, he will run an experiment to study effects of vegetation structure on sediment deposition.
Hao Tang
Hao did his Master at the Sichuan Agricultural University (China) and studied how rice can be used to remove heavy metals from contaminated soil. For his PhD-thesis he picked the topic of carbon sequestration in salt marshes. He will build on the work of Peter Müller and focus on the effect of hydrology on carbon sequestration. In his first experiment he is going to transplant different salt marsh vegetation into mesocosms in our tidal basins at the university. He will then use different flooding treatments to simulate sea level rise and see how it affects plant, soil respiration and microbial activity. Furthermore, he is going to study how grazing affects soil hydrology and how this in turn affects carbon sequestration in different soil layers in the field.
Stefanie Nolte 