Coastbusters

Welcome to my Professional Practice website!

My Professional Practice was part of the Coastbusters project. This project aims to find alternative ways of coastal protection. You can find a short introduction in the video below.

First, let me show you the types of coastal protection that are currently present along the Belgian coast. These can be found in the pictures underneath.

I found that these types of coastal protection along the Belgian coast have many negative effects. For example, these traditional coastal protection solutions like groynes and seawalls have been proven to cause intertidal habitat loss, biodiversity loss, community shifts and also causes increased long term erosion on adjacent shores. They do, however, protect the coast really well when they are repaired or heightened every now and then, but this comes at a high cost, both environmentally and economically. Beach nourishment is currently being used to prevent erosion caused by the traditional solutions and to reduce hydrodynamic energy that acts on these. Beach nourishment can also increase the beach width and the amount of wave attenuation. However, also this solution has negative effects on biodiversity because the organisms living at the location of the nourishment get buried while doing so. Extracting the sand to use in nourishment also destroys sedimentary habitat and causes benthic mortality. Since extraction and nourishment has increased over the past few decades, this problem becomes more and more important. This is why Coastbusters is looking on how to implement biogenic reefs like mussel and oyster reefs as a solution for coastal protection, without having to deal with the negative effects caused by traditional types of coastal protection.

Mussel (or other bivalve) reefs can be a cost-effective and sustainable solution for coastal protection, without all the negative effects of coastal protection. These reefs can provide multiple ecosystem services like water quality improvement (N and P reduction), carbon sequestration, augmented fish production, habitat provision and coastal protection. On top of these, they can also grow through time, faster then the sea-level rise, and can persist without maintenance for several decades. Because of all these benefits, they seem to be the best possible way of coastal protection. However, there is one catch,... . To be really effective as coastal protection, they need to be placed in intertidal habitat and in undeep water. This is hard because they need sufficient long periods of submersion to assure food availability.

The best overall solution would be hybrid solutions. In these, all types of coastal protection (groynes, seawalls, beach nourishment and mussel reefs) are used to provide the best coastal protection possible, while still retaining some ecosystem services that would not be there when only using groynes and seawalls. Because of this implementation of mussel reefs, the seawalls also need to be heightened a bit less frequently.

Because of the whole situation of the lockdown due to Covid-19, I was struggling quite a bit in the beginning of my Professional Practice, but this quickly changed in a positive way and I really enjoyed working around this subject and became more and more interested as I was reading more and more. Also the cooperation with my supervisor made the working from home a pleasure after the initial struggling. Overall I learned a lot and I found a direction I might want to pursue in my future career, which I think is one of the most important aspects of a Professional Practice. In my last pictures on this website, you can see the difference of me at the beginning and the end of my Professional Practice.