Anna Luisa is a PhD candidate at the Earth Science department at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She obtained her BSc in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the TU Hamburg and her MSc in Water Management at the TU Delft. Her PhD research for RESHAPE focuses on regional hydrology and resilience. A more natural configuration of water infiltration, usage, storage, and river flows of the highly altered sandy watersheds of the Netherlands is expected to improve the landscape’s resilience towards droughts, floods, and water quality deterioration. Therefore, Anna Luisa’s research aims to identify nature-inspired guiding principles (NIP) for selected Dutch sandy watersheds and to quantify their hydrological resilience gains. To derive the NIPs, she will study a gradient of landscapes from a global dataset. To quantify the resilience gains of these NIPs against droughts and floods in the selected Dutch watersheds, she will simulate the dynamic interactions between vegetation, soils, rivers, and landscape wetness conditions for various climates. Resulting from this analysis, she will identify the most effective nature-inspired hydrological strategies to improve the resilience of Dutch sand landscapes given a changing climate.
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