Karline Soetaert - Biography#

Karline Soetaert holds the chair marine ecosystem modelling at Utrecht University and is research leader at the Netherlands Institute of Sea Research. Her research is at the interface of physics, (biogeo)chemistry, biology and ecology and involves acquisition of field- or experimental data, as well as mechanistic or statistical modelling, and the combination of both

She is well-known for her transformative contributions on the coupling of benthic and pelagic ecosystems; specifically, she was the first to develop numerical models that allow quantitative studies of marine ecosystems dynamics including fast-turnover processes in sunlit surface waters and slow-turnover processes in subsurface sediments. She has the unique capability to develop quantitative models having the appropriate trade-off between complexity in physics, chemistry, and biology. In the mid 90-ies she developed novel transport-reaction models that were not only more generic, but also two orders of magnitude faster than before; this allowed her and her team to explore new research questions (e.g., seasonal variability at the seafloor, global sediment biogeochemistry) using a whole range of advanced data assimilation techniques that were new to the field. She was the first to use Monte-Carlo approaches, Bayesian inferences, formal identifiability and inverse modelling techniques in sediment biogeochemistry. This transformed the field from eye-fitting single profiles to full assessment of sensitivities, co-variances, etc. She developed a new way to explicitly model the impact of biological processes on the pH and alkalinity of natural waters; this approach showed to be essential to further our understanding of the impact of ocean acidification on ecosystems and to identify the potential impact of ocean alkalinization on ocean ecosystems.

She has published > 250 peer-reviewed papers that are well cited (11700 Scopus/19800 Google scholar) and has developed many, widely used scientific packages in R, generic ones (solving differential equations, inverse and sensitivity modelling, visualization) and products targeted towards ecology or biogeochemistry (reaction-transport models, food-web models and indices). These packages are all open source and actively maintained.