Frans Barends Award

TISOLS was taken as an opportunity to stimulate young researchers in their work by instigating the Frans Barends Award. Prof. Frans Barends (1946-2017) was an outstanding geo-scientist who has been one of the driving forces of the UNESCO Land Subsidence International Initiative. During his whole career he was supporting young scientists in the field of geomechanics.

Among the outstanding characteristics of prof. Barends were his ability to recognize young scientific talents and his skills to motivate them. Therefore, the aim of the award is to encourage young people to practice research and publish on the topic of land subsidence in its broadest sense.

We sent an invitation to nominate first authors of TISOLS contributions younger than 35 years for the award. The Jury was happy to receive 19 nominations. The associated papers were carefully assessed on the basis of their scientific novelty, the quality of presentation and the relevance for land subsidence.

The Jury found the general level of the papers remarkably good. Still, three of them were standing out. After a close assessment the Jury was unanimous that the first prize with 500€ should be awarded to Philip Conroy for his contribution “First results of Dutch peatland subsidence observations using InSAR” (by P. Conroy, S.A.N. van Diepen, F.J. van Leijen and R.F. Hanssen). The Jury judged his contribution as well-written, highly relevant, and groundbreaking. The surface movement of peatlands, while critical for the development of these areas, has always been extremely hard to measure on a sufficiently large spatial scale. Conroy created a new method that has the potential to radically improve our monitoring capability of land subsidence in peatlands.

The shared second and third prizes with 250€ each were awarded to Selena Baldan and Manon Verberne.

The contribution of Selena Baldan, “Poro-mechanical modelling of an in-situ loading experiment in a natural marsh in the Venice Lagoon” (by S. Baldan, M. Ferronato, A. Franceschini, C. Zoccarato, V. Girardi, P.S.J. Minderhoud, L. Tosi, M. Cosma, C. Da Lio, A. Bergamasco and P. Teatini) was assessed as a combination of an innovative large-scale experiment, described by an advanced numerical model that was finetuned with a sound calibration method. It is the combination of these different aspects that make the approach stand out.

Manon Verberne’s paper, “Disentangling shallow and deep sources of subsidence on a regional scale in the Netherlands” (by M.A.M. Verberne, K. Koster, T. Candela and P.A. Fokker) shows how a comprehensive incorporation of all available knowledge can lead to new insights. She studied an area with multiple sources of subsidence, deployed multiple sources of knowledge and data, and applied advanced data assimilation technology to disentangle the contribution of the different sources.

With these prizes we hope to recognize and motivate young scientific talents in the field of land subsidence research.

The Jury
Peter A. Fokker (TNO; Chair of the Scientific Committee of TISOLS).
Pietro Teatini (University of Padova; Chair of the Unesco Land Subsidence International Initiative)
Shujun Ye (Nanjing University; Co-chair of the Unesco Land Subsidence International Initiative)
Esther Stouthamer (Utrecht University)