Niek Verschaeren

Student visiting from Wageningen University (Netherlands)

Niek Verschaeren is a Dutch student from Wageningen University and Research Centre (the Neterlands). He will do his master thesis here at our research group, within the European project Diverfarming. This project aims to find a way how farming can be both profitable and sustainable. Within this project valuable intercrops are planted, which can reduce erosion. The coming months he will do research on this subject and will look at how these intercrops affects erosion. He will measure erosion with 3 different methods: 1) erosion pins (see image), 2) mapping of erosion features and 3) drone images. Erosion pins will measure erosion very accurately on a small scale. Mapping of erosion features will help to estimate erosion at larger spatial scales. Drone images will be used for getting insight in the connectivity of the area and will also be used to measure differences in the future for different scales. He will perform his research at our group until the end of December and finish his thesis in Wageningen. Supervision and guidance from our group is provided by Maria Martinez-Mena, (Pedro Perez Cutillas) and Carolina Boix-Fayos.