Jakob Wallinga

Wageningen University & Research | WUR · Department of Soil Geography and Landscape

Plaggic anthrosols demonstrate the significant and widespread influence of agriculture on the landscape of northern Europe and testify to increased land-use intensity over the last millennium. However, a lack of established chronologic methods to interrogate these soils has hindered research on their formation history, so the timing and process of...

The Peel Boundary Fault zone (PBFZ) is the 125 km long, seismically active, northern bounding fault zone of the Roer Valley Rift System (RVRS). The last damaging earthquake along the PBFZ was the Roermond earthquake of 1992. It had a magnitude of Mw 5.3 and no surface rupture. Previous results from two trenching studies located in the central and s...

Plaggic anthrosols are one of the major features that contributed to the formation of the present-day landscape of northern part of Europe since the Middle Ages, but their formation history is rather poorly understood. The formation of plaggic anthrosols had an impact beyond the arable fields, impacting the entire landscape surrounding the arable f...

The drift sand area near Hilversum, the Netherlands, holds a geo-archive with multiple drift sand phases and intercalated palaeosols. We studied this area to test earlier theories on the development of podzols in such aeolian sands, the occurrence of sand drifting, and the contemporary vegetation development, and to gain insight into the early huma...

On the mainland of northwest Europe generally only remnants of former peat landscapes subsist. Due to the poor preservation of these landscapes, alternative approaches to reconstruct peat initiation and lateral expansion are needed compared to regions with intact peat cover. Here we aim (1) to find explanatory variables within a digital soil mappin...

Quantifying sediment transport and storage in fluvial systems is fundamental for understanding the transfer of eroded materials from source to sink. Here, we investigated the potential of a combined approach using a luminescence measured in modern fluvial sediments and numerical simulations to quantify transport and storage in rivers. We acquired l...

In the mainland of Northwest Europe generally only remnants of former peat landscapes subsist. Due to the poor preservation of these landscapes, alternative approaches to reconstruct peat initiation and lateral expansion are needed compared to regions with intact peat cover. Here we aim (1) to find explanatory variables within a digital soil mappin...

Single‐grain post‐infrared infrared stimulated luminescence (SG‐pIRIR) of feldspar has recently been introduced as a method to date Quaternary deposits. The method is particularly appropriate for fluvial deposits that cannot be dated by more conventional quartz optically stimulated luminescence dating and that are heterogeneously bleached, i.e. whe...

Attributing the start of peat growth to an absolute timescale requires dating the bottom of peat deposits overlying mineral sediment, often called the basal peat. Peat initiation is reflected in the stratigraphy as a gradual transition from mineral sediment to increasingly organic material, up to where it is called peat. So far, varying criteria ha...

Fluvial depositional architecture in an unconfined environment is governed by sediment dispersal across the alluvial plain through river-path switching by avulsion. Documented inter-avulsion periodicity from modern rivers ranges from tens to over a thousand years. In this study, a quantitative spatio-temporal reconstruction of avulsion history is p...

Significance Peatlands are sensitive ecosystems that store carbon and water and support biodiversity. Currently, European peatlands are threatened by climate change and exploitation. In this study, we show that many landscape settings may support both wetland ecosystems on thick peat soils and forest ecosystems on thin organic soils. Both ecosystem...

Faults of the Roer Valley Rift System (RVRS) are characterized by seismicity, scarps and displaced fluvial terraces, showing that they are active. The Heerlerheide fault is part of the southern boundary fault system of the RVRS, the Feldbiss fault zone (FFZ). During the late 19th and first half of the 20th century coal was mined in the subsurface s...

There is a growing interest for rescue and reuse of data from past studies (so‐called legacy data). Data loss is alarming, especially where natural archives are under threat, such as peat deposits. Here we develop a workflow for reuse of legacy radiocarbon dates in peatland studies, including a rigorous quality assessment that can be tailored to sp...

Two cores from a Weichselian periglacial alluvial fan were dated using ¹⁴C and OSL, to verify the reliability of both methods and check the upper dating limit of the ¹⁴C method. Both dating methods yielded a similar chronology for core Eerbeek-I, with infinite ¹⁴C dates for the lower part where OSL dates indicated ages of over 45 ka. Finite ¹⁴C dat...

Large-amplitude meanders may form in low-energy rivers despite generally limited mobility in theses systems. Exceptionally large meanders which even extend beyond the valley sides have developed in the Overijsselse Vecht river (the Netherlands) between ca. 1400 CE (Common Era) and the early 1900s, when channelization occurred. Previous studies have...

Rivers exhibit a wide variety of channel patterns, and predicting changes in channel pattern is important in order to foresee river responses to climate change and river restoration. Many discriminators have been developed to define approximate boundary conditions for different channel patterns, based on channel-pattern-controlling parameters such...

Humans have substantially altered soil and landscape patterns and properties due to agricultural use, with severe impacts on biodiversity, carbon sequestration and food security. These impacts are difficult to quantify, because we lack data on long-term changes in soils in natural and agricultural settings and available simulation methods are not s...

Meandering rivers are abundant on Earth, from the largest rivers to the smallest tributaries. The classical view of meandering rivers is a sinuous planform with rounded bends, which grow and migrate until they are cut off. However, many low‐energy meandering rivers have planforms that are much more complex than this classical view due to the hetero...

Recent geochronology of the Mississippi Delta of coastal Louisiana, USA, provides a high-resolution record of land growth that facilitates the study of ancient settlement patterns in relation to delta evolution. We use stratigraphy and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating to show that two Late Holocene earthen mounds were constructed seve...

This contribution tests the added value of including landslide path dependency in statistically based landslide susceptibility modelling. A conventional pixel-based landslide susceptibility model was compared with a model that includes landslide path dependency and with a purely path-dependent landslide susceptibility model. To quantify path depend...

Abstract. Humans have substantially altered soil and landscape patterns and properties due to agricultural use, with severe impacts on biodiversity, carbon sequestration and food security. These impacts are difficult to quantify, because we lack data on long-term changes in soils in natural and agricultural settings and available simulation methods...

Reconstructing sediment pathways in fluvial and deltaic systems beyond instrumental records is challenging due to a lack of suitable methods. Here we explore the potential of luminescence methods for such purposes, focusing on bleaching of the optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) signal of quartz sediments in a large fluviodeltaic system across...

Paleoseismological trenching studies constrain recurrence times and magnitudes of faulting events and earthquakes on active faults. In a trench along the central part of the Peel Boundary fault zone (PBFZ), southeastern Netherlands, evidence was found for such a large faulting event that occurred around 14 ka. The event caused a fault scarp in unco...

This contribution tests the added value of including landslide path dependency in statistically-based landslide susceptibility modelling. A conventional pixel-based landslide susceptibility model was compared with a model that includes landslide path dependency, and with a purely path dependent landslide susceptibility model. To quantify path depen...

Constraining time is of critical importance to evaluating the rates and relative contributions of processes driving landscape change in sedimentary basins. The geomorphic character of the field setting guides the application of geochronologic or instrumental tools to this problem, because the viability of methods can be highly influenced by geomorp...

Luminescence signals of quartz and feldspar minerals are widely used to determine the burial age of Quaternary sediments. Although luminescence signals bleach rapidly with sunlight exposure, incomplete bleaching may affect luminescence ages, in particular in fluvial settings where an unbleached remnant signal is commonly encountered in modern alluv...

Humans triggered or accelerated erosion processes since prehistoric times through agricultural practices. Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) is widely used to quantify phases and rates of the corresponding landscape change, by measuring the last moment of daylight exposure of sediments. However, natural and anthropogenic mixing processes, such...

The interplay of bioturbation, soil production and long‐term erosion/deposition in soil and landscape co‐evolution is poorly understood. Single‐grain post‐infrared infrared stimulated luminescence (post‐IR IRSL) measurements on sand‐sized grains of feldspar from the soil matrix can provide direct information on all three processes. To explore the p...

Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating of sediment, based on the accumulation of trapped charge in natural crystals since their last exposure to daylight, has revolutionised our understanding of the late Quaternary period. Recently, a complementary technique called luminescence rock surface dating (RSD), which uses differential spatial evic...

Prediction of ecosystem responses to global environmental change is a pressing scientific challenge of major societal relevance. Many ecosystems display nonlinear responses to environmental change, and may even undergo practically irreversible ‘regime shifts’ that initiate ecosystem collapse. Recently, early warning signals based on spatiotemporal...

Storm surges have a major impact on land use and human habitation in coastal regions. Our knowledge of this impact can be improved by correlating long‐term historical storm records with sedimentary evidence of storm surges, but so far few studies have applied such an approach. Here we apply, for the first time, state‐of‐the‐art OSL methods to obtai...

While a number of studies have investigated bleaching of the optical signals of sediments in rivers and deltas, unified trends and mechanisms for bleaching in these settings remain unresolved. Here, we explore the bleaching of the optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) signal of quartz sediments in a large fluviodeltaic system across time and spac...

Quartz is the preferred dosimeter for luminescence dating of Holocene sediments as optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) signals reset rapidly upon light exposure, and are stable over time. However, feldspar is required where quartz luminescence properties are inappropriate for dating, as is often the case in geologically young mountain ranges an...

River channel patterns may alter due to changes in hydrological regime related to changes in climate and/or land cover. Such changes are well documented for transitions between meandering and braiding rivers, whereas channel pattern changes between laterally stable and meandering rivers are poorly documented and understood. We hypothesize that many...

Identifying lateral migration rates of meandering rivers is relevant both for fluvial geomorphology and to support river management. Lateral migration rates for contemporary meandering systems are often reconstructed based on sequential remote-sensing images or historical maps; however, the time frame for which these sources are available is limite...

Absolute age dating with Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) measurements, in combination with Google Earth Pro imagery and differential GPS (dGPS) measurements was employed to unravel the processes and timing of river avulsions and the resultant sedimentary architecture of a network of Holocene Río Colorado (Altiplano Basin, Bolivia) channel b...

Holocene drift-sand activity in the northwest European sand belt is commonly directly linked to population pressure (agricultural activity) or to climate change (e.g. storminess). In the Pleistocene sand areas of the Netherlands, small-scale Holocene drift-sand activity began in the Mesolithic, whereas large-scale sand drifting started during the M...

Landslide susceptibility modelling — a crucial step towards the assessment of landslide hazard and risk — has hitherto not included the local, transient effects of previous landslides on susceptibility. In this contribution, we implement such transient effects, which we term "landslide path dependency', for the first time. Two landslide path depend...

Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating of heterogeneously-bleached sediment by means of a minimum age model requires the input of a ‘sigma_b’ (σb) value describing the overdispersion of the single-aliquot De distribution expected for a well-bleached sample. We propose that σb and associated uncertainty can be accurately determined if a larg...

Visual soil evaluation (VSE) is a simple and fast method to assess soil quality in situ, and is becoming increasingly popular. Besides soil structure assessment, also other soil properties can be assessed such as grass cover, roots and earthworms. Yet, the full set of visual observations has not been properly evaluated for reproducibility and corre...

Identifying lateral migration rates of meandering rivers is relevant both for fluvial geomorphology and to support river management. Lateral migration rates for contemporary meandering systems are often reconstructed based on sequential remote sensing images or historical maps, however the time frame for which these sources are available is limited...

The decline of several of the world's largest deltas has spurred interest in expensive coastal restoration projects to make these economically and ecologically vital regions more sustainable. The success of these projects depends, in part, on our understanding of how delta plains evolve over time scales longer than the instrumental record. Building...

This paper demonstrates that the Belgian Continental Shelf and coastal plain occupy a key position between the depositional North Sea Basin and the erosional area of the Dover Strait as it is an area where erosional landforms and fragmented sedimentary sequences provide new evidence on northwest European landscape evolution. The study area hosts 20...

Identifying lateral migration rates of meandering rivers is relevant both for fluvial geomorphology and to support river management. Lateral migration rates for contemporary meandering systems are often reconstructed based on sequential remote sensing images or historical maps, however the time frame for which these sources are available is limited...

This GIS dataset contains a new national overview of the occurrence of drift-sand activity in the Netherlands from ca. 5000 BC to AD 1700. The dataset has been compiled from overview studies, field studies and new data.

Erosion processes, aggravated by human activity, have a large impact on the spatial variation of soil and topographic properties. Knowledge of the topography prior to human-induced erosion (paleotopography) in naturally stable landscapes is valuable for identifying vulnerable landscape positions and is required as starting point for erosion modelli...

Dryland rivers are characterized by the gradual downstream decrease in width and depth in the low-gradient coastal plain trajectory. In scarce, punctuated flood periods, the peak-runoff volume by far exceeds the bankfull river capacity and leads to massive flood-outs with formation of an extensive sheet complex of amalgamated crevasse splays and te...

The beach-ridge sequence of the Usumacinta–Grijalva delta borders a 300 km long section of the southern Gulf of Mexico coast. With around 500 beach ridges formed in the last 6500 years, the sequence is unsurpassed in the world in terms of numbers of individual ridges preserved, continuity of the record, and temporal resolution. We mapped and dated...

The sedimentary architecture at the terminus of the low-gradient, semi-arid Holocene Río Colorado river system (Altiplano Basin, Bolivia) is characterized by a network of laterally-amalgamated alluvial ridges (Fig. 1). To analyze the processes and timing that created the sedimentary architecture, Google Earth-Pro imagery of river morphology and cha...

Soil reworking, e.g. due to bioturbation, is an important aspect of soil and landscape evolution. Yet, rates of soil mixing are poorly constrained, especially on pedological and geomorphological relevant time scales of decades to millennia. This study presents a novel method to reconstruct soil reworking rates on such timescales by utilising lumine...

The beach-ridge sequence of the Usumacinta-Grijalva delta borders a 300-km-long section of the Southern Mexico Gulf coast. With around 500 beach ridges formed in the last 6500 years, the sequence is unsurpassed in the world in terms of numbers of individual ridges preserved, continuity of the record, and temporal resolution. We mapped and dated the...

Landslide susceptibility map (LSM) is a key element in hazard mitigation, risk management and regional planning. In mountainous area, hazard prediction, disaster prevention, mitigation strategies, crisis and risk management , and proper land use planning need reliable and accurate landslide susceptibility mapping. We got inspired when we looked at...

Landslides cause major environmental damage, economic losses and casualties. Although susceptibility to landsliding is usually considered an exclusively location-specific phenomenon, indications exist that landslide history co-determines susceptibility to future landslides. In this contribution, we quantified the role of landslide path dependency (...