Projects

This project will reinforce the CongoFORCE FED-tWIN research profile (FED-tWIN2019-prf-075). Tropical forests have been in peril over the last decades due to severe dieback of trees, e.g. due to changing environmental conditions. Most insights in the responses of vegetation to climate depend on short-term records (annual or decadal-scale), yet short-term sensitivities do not necessarily translate into long-term responses (centennial or ...

Human land use and in particular deforestation has changed ecosystem pattern and processes of most of the terrestrial biosphere. It is therefore one of the elements used to define the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch characterised by anthropogenic changes in the Earth’s system. This is often described as historically recent and potentially catastrophic for both humanity and the biosphere, but recent palaeoecological, archaeological and ...

Recent developments in remote sensing (RS) have great potential for urban, environmental and archaeological applications. This interdisciplinary project evaluates

the potential of RS-imagery to model the human environment interactions in large fluvial systems through time and the impact of these interactions

on the natural and cultural heritage.

Several topics will be addressed: Digital elevation models for morphological ...

Lateglacial and Holocene environmental changes are studied by pollen and diatom analysis of sediment samples taken from vertical sequences in the alluvial plains of the Middle and Lower Scheldt basin. Combined with radiocarbon dates, this results in a reconstruction of the environmental and vegetation history in the region. Furthermore, links with early human occupation and climate fluctuations can be studied.

Proglacial lakes have an enormous influence on glacier/ice margin stability, global sea level and climate; this is true for the past, the present and, more than ever, the near future. Such lakes form in front of glaciers or ice margins, where meltwater ponds in between the ice and a dam. Commonly, such dams consist of bedrock or glacial sediment deposited by the ice when it reached its maximum extent. When these dams are broken or overtopped, ...

The Belgian Continental Shelf is the smallest exclusive economic zone of the North Sea and is bounded by the French, British and Dutch Continental Shelves, however the number of economic and societal claims is very large, comprising fishing, military defence, sand extraction, maintenance dredging, shipping, wind farms, pipelines and cables. On top of that, the scarce economic resource of the Quaternary sediments of the Belgian Continental ...

Tsunamis are relatively rare in the North Sea basin. The best-known example is the Storegga tsunami, which was caused by a large underwater landslide on the Norwegian continental slope ca. 8200 years ago and left a sedimentary imprint of major inundation at a range of onshore locations across the North Atlantic and the North Sea. Some of the coastal areas of the Shetland Islands also contain deposits of tsunamis that took place at ca. 5500 yr ...