Author Archives: woutvandijk

About woutvandijk

My name is Wout van Dijk and I am a PhD-candidate at Utrecht University, faculty of Geosciences, department of Physical Geography. I was born in november 1983 in the hospital of Leidschendam, moved to Zoetermeer, and since a few years I am living in Utrecht. I like to play soccer, go out to cycle, walk or run. My research is on how meandering rivers can form in a laboratory, which I started in April 2009. Earlier experiments failed to reproduce sustainable meandering. The question is to what extent this is due to scaling problems and to what extent it reflects our limited understanding. So far, we simulate several river patterns by varying sediment mixtures. Further, we seeded small vegetation to understand the effect of vegetation on the channel pattern. Our experiments represents a gravel-bed river. A very nice example of a gravel-bed meandering river is the river Allier in France (in reserve naturelle Val d'Allier, goo.gl/FRBG8) The objective of my research is 'to understand what are the necessary and sufficient conditions to form dynamic meandering rivers and floodplains in the lab'.