Van Oord engineer Johannes Becker was awarded the Hydraulic Engineering Award 2012 for his MSc thesis ‘Dredge plumes, ecological risk assessment’, at Delft University of Technology.
An important element in assessing the environmental aspects of dredging is linking (temporary) changes in water quality with ecological response. Although this topic receives a lot of attention in major hydraulic engineering infrastructure world-wide, a sound mathematical approach for generically linking the two was as yet not available.
In his work Becker developed a generic framework and applied it to available ecological response data using a probabilistic approach. Follow-up research applying that approach to real project data is currently on-going.
The jury of the Hydraulic Engineering Award was impressed with the way he managed to develop this approach and appreciated its practical applicability.
[mappress]
Press Release, November 9, 2012