Research team
Expertise
Dr. Dirk Vrebos has been a researcher at the Ecosystem Management Research Group since 2009 and conducts research into climate adaptation, ecosystem services, water management and spatial planning. Over the years, he has specialized in the spatial evaluation of water-related data, ecosystem services and soil functions in Flanders and Europe. As a result, he has broad theoretical and practical knowledge of these topics, as well as extensive experience in the use of various GIS and statistical programs and techniques and a broad knowledge of the available GIS data and databases that are relevant for spatial policy in Flanders. From 2009 to 2012, he worked on his PhD thesis entitled “Understanding flows for integrated water management: water quality, quantity and ecosystem services.” Within this thesis, extensive knowledge was gained on the general functioning of a catchment system, the statistical analysis of water quantity and quality data and the construction and integration of different types of spatial data. During this period he was also involved in the FP7 project 'AFROMAISON' which researched Integrated Natural Resources Management' in Africa and developed a methodology to evaluate ecosystem services in data-poor regions. From 2012 to 2016 he mainly worked on the ECOPLAN (IWT-SBO) project "Planning for Ecosystem Services". Within this project he was responsible for the development of a QGIS plugin that can calculate the delivery of a range of ecosystem services within Flanders. When developing this plug-in, specific Flemish ecosystem services studies as well as a large number of Flemish (GIS) datasets were used. These data were translated into models for the evaluation of ecosystem services as well as spatial input maps (eg land cover) that are necessary for the ecosystem services calculations at the Flemish level. In the Horizon 2020 project LANDMARK (2015 – 2019) he worked as an overarching post-doctoral researcher. He was responsible for the evaluation of European policy on the functioning of soil functions in agricultural areas. To this end, a series of Bayesian networks were developed that allowed to evaluate the impact of certain policy scenarios on these soil functions. In the period 2018-2019 he was responsible for the technical development of a QGIS plug-in for the evaluation of ecosystem services in Estuaries (INTERREG project Smartsediment). In addition, he also contributed to the development of a global socio-economic impact analysis of the implementation of the Flemish NATURA-2000 programme. Since 2019 he has been working on the FWO-SBO project EcoCities in which he develops developing a GIS tool to calculate the impact of green roofs on the ecosystem services delivery. He is also involved in a number of other projects such as the INTERREG 2 SEAS project “PROWATER" (Protection and restoration of groundwater systems at landscape level), the HORIZON 2020 project UPSURGE (Nature-based solutions for climate adaptation in cities) and the FWO-SBO project TURQUOISE (Blue-green strategies for climate adaptation).