Saltmarshes are important stores of ‘Blue Carbon’ and therefore a crucial part of the fight against climate change. Thanks to a St John’s Student Opportunities Fund grant, Rosie Adams was able to investigate these marshes on a research placement in the Netherlands.
The St John’s Student Opportunities Fund allowed me the chance to work in the Netherlands from March to July 2023 to undertake a research internship at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) as part of my placement year for my Geography degree.
Dutch research internships are typically unpaid and therefore, I had to support myself for 5 months which was why I needed the help of the Student Opportunities fund.
My time in the Netherlands has proved invaluably useful for personal development as well as helping to direct my future career. At the NIOZ, I was primarily helping a PhD candidate with her project which involved a lot of field and lab work as well as data analysis.
The project focuses on understanding saltmarsh edge dynamics and stability in the face of climate-change driven processes such as sea level rise, increased storminess and droughts, in the context of developing nature-based flood defense solutions.
I also got the opportunity to help plan and guide my own research project that related to an aspect of her PhD. For my project I investigated the influence of increasing saltmarsh inundation on carbon losses by decomposition.
The outcome of this project is particularly important as saltmarshes are important stores of ‘blue carbon’ and there for it is important to understand how these stores are going to be influenced by rising sea levels.
The results of my experiment so far have shown that with increasing inundation, the decomposition rate of organic matter in the saltmarsh decreases. This is good news as it means that as sea levels rise, less carbon will be lost from these important ecosystems my decomposition.
This is important as it means that these carbon stores will not contribute further carbon dioxide to the atmosphere which would exacerbate the effects of climate change.
“My time in the Netherlands has proved invaluably useful”
This research internship has helped me to develop many important skills through the field and lab work as well as improving my data analysis and coding skills to process my results.
This has been very beneficial as during the first two years of my degree I missed out on a lot of these kind of key training opportunities due to COVID.
This internship also provided me with the opportunity to attend a Blue Carbon Summer School run by the University of Lille which has improved my knowledge of this topic and will help with my understanding of this area for my final year at university.
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