‘I like talking to people who have different backgrounds about OR ELSE. Nobody knows about sand extraction and how sand pits affect life in the North Sea and they are surprised or amazed about it.’ Mohammad is a post-doctoral researcher in OR ELSE, working at the NIOZ in Texel. He works on models that predict the effect of sand pits. A sandpit in the sea changes the balance between water movement and sea bottom. This influences the impact of sunlight and waves.
Mohammad continues: ‘The fact that many people don’t know what’s going on at sea made me think that scientists should explain more about what we do and why it’s important. OR ELSE aims at this by developing a serious game’.
The many disciplines within the project were attractive to Mohammad: coastal physics, biology, game developers, digital twin, stakeholders, environmental policy, all within good scientific institutions. It works out as he imagined: he works with all researchers in the team. ‘I also like the way in which OR ELSE can contribute to a policy for sustainable sand extraction, which is an important environmental issue in the Netherlands.’
The fact that the team consists of people who have different backgrounds led to misunderstandings in the beginning of the project but thanks to regular collaborative meetings they learned to understand each other. Mohammad: ‘And we are sharing our data. In this project I have learned about the importance of making data useful for other disciplines and transferable for other uses. It is key to make it simple to understand. I became better at this by presenting for different audiences and answering the questions they pose. I got better feedback on simpler presentations.’
Mohammad explains how his work connects to the other workpackages: I’m modeling how a sand pit in the North Sea can affect the vertical structure of water temperature at different depths and influence water mixing. Stef does experiments in the lab and finds out how water mixing impacts zooplankton. Together this tells us how sand pits affect the plankton in different places. The same goes for the work of Wout who looks at the evolution of sandpits in time: as the sand pit’s depths change, their impacts change. It would be nice if all interactions becomes clear in the digital twin that Henrique works on.
‘The Serious Game is a tool for decision making and it’s less complicated than the Digital Twin. The Serious Game gives a glimpse of what the Digital Twin could bring.’ Mohammad wants to be impactful and help shape decisions. `I’m proud of the map we made on the safe depth for sand pits to avoid harmful water layering, and the fact that it was used in the serious game. It was reported back by Maria that stakeholders found it useful.’
Mohammad is very excited about the digital twin as a joint point of the project. In it all work packages will be connected. ‘This digital twin is a new and promising tool to run scenario’s (something that the serious game won’t do). We don’t know what it will bring OR ELSE, but that is partly why I’m so excited about it. I’m a scientist and I like things that we don’t know yet!’