Marine historical ecology
MarHis research focuses on North Sea marine life in previous centuries.
Historic literature and data are studied to reconstruct fish populations and benthic life in the past. The results are printed in papers or reports.
Literature on the pristine state, before fisheries, is unavailable. However, knowledge on populations as far back in time as possible, is important for today's restoration efforts and planning of marine protected areas.
Finished projects
- 16th-century fish populations and fisheries, described in the Fishbook of Adriaen Coenen
- Long-term occurences of blue tuna in the North Sea
- Offshore flat oysterbeds in the central North Sea
- Sidestep in the Caribbean: Reef fish trends in Bonaire from 2000 to 2019
North Sea benthos 1902-1912 project
This project focuses on early marine benthos,the invertebrates at the seabed. Old survey data were digitised to study the distribution of benthos. Early 20th-century data of the UK research vessel Huxley, the Dutch vessel Wodan and the German vessel Poseidon are used to plot historic distribution maps. The distribution is further analysed in texts and graphs. The first resulting manuscript includes a great amount of maps, better for a report than a paper. In 2022 I issued a corrected version. The reports are available in Results
