The Sand Motor

Cel­e­brat­ing 10 Years of Build­ing with Nature | FAIR Data for Col­lab­o­ra­tion and Impact

As part of a North Sea coastal defence project, the Sand Motor (Zand­mo­tor) was con­struct­ed off the coast of the Nether­lands in 2011. The final project con­fer­ence was com­bined with the pro­ceed­ings of the Coastal Dynam­ics Con­fer­ence in July 2021 to mark 10 years of the Zand­mo­tor.

A large penin­su­la-shaped arti­fi­cial sand­bank cov­er­ing 128 hectares, the Sand Motor, has served as a liv­ing lab along the Dutch coast­line for research into the effects of tides, winds and water cur­rents as they spread more than 21 mil­lion cubic meters of sand along the coast between the towns of Ter Hei­de and Kijk­duin over the past decade. 

Com­mis­sioned by Rijk­swa­ter­staat, the Netherland’s Direc­torate-Gen­er­al for Pub­lic Works and Water Man­age­ment, and the Province of South Hol­land, the pilot project was ini­ti­at­ed with a 2.5 kilo­me­ter length of sand that has been dis­trib­uted over a 5 kilo­me­ter stretch of coast over the past decade. A sin­gle deliv­ery of a large quan­ti­ty of sand that was sub­se­quent­ly dis­trib­uted by nat­ur­al process­es pre­vent­ed repeat­ed instances of seabed dis­tur­bance.

The dynam­ics of this chang­ing coastal land­scape has pro­vid­ed researchers from mul­ti­ple uni­ver­si­ties and knowl­edge insti­tutes from diverse dis­ci­plines with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to observe the real-time effects of tides, wind and water cur­rents.

This inno­v­a­tive coastal main­te­nance exper­i­ment has made it pos­si­ble to explore a wide range of research ques­tions relat­ed to coast­line pro­tec­tion and man­age­ment as well as eco­log­i­cal and recre­ation­al expan­sion efforts.

Research data col­lect­ed through diverse stud­ies at the Sand Motor is used to address var­i­ous research ques­tions such as:

• How does the sand spread along the coast and to what extent does the Sand Motor con­tribute to coastal safe­ty? 

• What does the Sand Motor mean for coastal recre­ation and the devel­op­ment of nature in the shal­low sea waters, on the beach and in the dunes? 

• Will an increase in fish and birds on the new coast­line be observed? 

The research data being gath­ered is reveal­ing insights into how to main­tain the coast in an eco­log­i­cal­ly sound man­ner in what the Rijk­swa­ter­staat calls “Work­ing with, rather than against, nature”.

A remark­able fea­ture of this pilot project is the col­lab­o­ra­tion across nation­al research insti­tutes, aca­d­e­m­ic uni­ver­si­ties and pub­lic sec­tor agen­cies. The col­lab­o­ra­tion is evi­dent not only in the Sand Motor con­struc­tion and ongo­ing research agen­da, but also in the effort to make research data emerg­ing from the diverse research projects open­ly avail­able. 

Dat­ing back to 2014, sev­er­al research datasets from research into and about the Sand Motor have been pub­lished in our repos­i­to­ry. These datasets are from the domains of atmos­pher­ic sci­ences, geol­o­gy, soil sci­ences, phys­i­cal geog­ra­phy and envi­ron­men­tal geo­science and the envi­ron­men­tal and nat­ur­al resource eval­u­a­tion.

The first Zand­mo­tor dataset pub­lished in 4TU.ResearchData was sub­mit­ted by researchers Cor­jan Nolet and P. Roos­jen from Wagenin­gen Uni­ver­si­ty & Research. The dataset under­lies a research project on mod­el­ling spec­tral reflectance of beach sand under dif­fer­ent mois­ture con­di­tions.

Nolet, for­mer­ly of Wagenin­gen Uni­ver­si­ty and now with Future Water, notes that the “dataset was lat­er used inde­pen­dent­ly by oth­er researchers from ITC Fac­ul­ty Geo-Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence and Earth Obser­va­tion, Uni­ver­si­ty of Twente, under­scor­ing the added val­ue of mak­ing data freely avail­able to the research com­mu­ni­ty.”

In 2016, a ded­i­cat­ed Sand Motor col­lec­tion was estab­lished that now com­pris­es 23 dif­fer­ent datasets from a diverse range of research projects. Although not an exhaus­tive col­lec­tion of all research datasets and soft­ware code gen­er­at­ed in the course of Zand­mo­tor research projects, this impres­sive col­lec­tion rep­re­sents work, includ­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive projects, of researchers from Aqua­vi­sion, Boskalis, Deltares, EcoShape, Imares, Nortek, Ore­gon State Uni­ver­si­ty, Provin­cie Zuid-Hol­land, Rijk­swa­ter­staat, Shore Mon­i­tor­ing and Research, TU Delft, Uni­ver­si­ty of Twente, Utrecht Uni­ver­si­ty, Van Oord, VU Uni­ver­si­ty Ams­ter­dam and Wagenin­gen Uni­ver­si­ty. The col­lec­tion has received near­ly 4,000 views and 915 down­loads since Sep­tem­ber 2020 with a medi­an of 157 views and 35 down­loads respec­tive­ly.

As Anne­mieke Nijhof, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of Deltares, not­ed in her keynote speech Reflect­ing for­ward on the Sand Motor at the recent the Coastal Dynam­ics 2021 con­fer­ence, “…the Sand Motor gives us a glimpse into the future of the coast of the Netherlands…from a pro­tec­tion point of view as well as in terms of space for nature and recre­ation. Knowl­edge gen­er­at­ed by research into the Sand Motor offers a start­ing point for inno­v­a­tive coastal water man­age­ment where sand is a con­struc­tion ele­ment.”

In the same vein, pub­lish­ing data aris­ing from this unique project con­tributes to research into press­ing soci­etal and eco­log­i­cal issues of our times through the cre­ation of an open­ly acces­si­ble resource for fur­ther use by oth­er researchers. 

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The Sand Motor is a pilot project of Rijk­swa­ter­staat and the Province of South Hol­land in col­lab­o­ra­tion with knowl­edge insti­tutes and uni­ver­si­ties includ­ing among oth­ers Deltares, Wagenin­gen Marine Research and TU Delft. For more infor­ma­tion www.dezandmotor.nl.

Ref­er­ences 

1. De Zand­mo­tor, accessed 8 July 2021. URL https://dezandmotor.nl/en/ 
2. RWS Ani­ma­tion on Vimeo https://vimeo.com/352255689, avail­able via https://dezandmotor.nl/en/about-the-sand-motor/

3. Jeroen Bezem, 5 July 2021, Tien jaar Zand­mo­tor: ‘Extra gereed­schap voor het kust­be­heer’, Water Forum URL: https://www.waterforum.net/tien-jaar-zandmotor-extra-gereedschap-voor-het-kustbeheer/ 
4. H2O Actueel, 2 July 2021, ‘De Zand­mo­tor is gro­ten­deels een suc­cesver­haal’. https://www.h2owaternetwerk.nl/h2o-actueel/de-zandmotor-is-een-succesverhaal 

Dataset DOIs

• Nolet, Cor­jan; Roos­jen, P. (2014): Lab­o­ra­to­ry spec­troscopy exper­i­ment: Spec­tral reflectance of beach sand as func­tion of sur­face mois­ture con­tent with sam­ple of beach sand col­lect­ed from the Sand Motor, the Nether­lands. 4TU.ResearchData. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.4121/uuid:866135c2-2be3-4b74-8f9c-922505285a7b  
• Zand­mo­tor data / Sand Motor data Col­lec­tion | Rijk­swa­ter­staat; Provin­cie Zuid-Hol­land; EcoShape (2016): Zand­mo­tor data / Sand Motor data. 4TU.ResearchData. Col­lec­tion. https://doi.org/10.4121/collection:zandmotor