dr. MJA (Marjolijn) Christianen

Marjolijn Christianen is a Professor of Marine Ecology at Wageningen University and, starting in March 2027, will head the Department of Marine Animal Ecology. From 1 March 2027, she will lead a department that studies how marine animals shape and are shaped by coastal and ocean ecosystems under global change. She sets the department's research and education agenda, supports the next generation of marine scientists, and builds partnerships with nature managers, policymakers, and international research institutes. She is also a committee member of the Netherlands National Thematic Committee on Biodiversity Research (NTBO), where she ensures the ocean and the Caribbean part of the Kingdom have a firm place in the biodiversity roadmap. 

Her research focuses on biodiversity and rewilding in coastal ecosystems, spanning seagrass meadows, sea turtles, and coral reefs in the tropics, as well as oyster and Sabellaria reefs in the North Sea. She is fascinated by feedbacks between ecosystem engineers (seagrass, shellfish reefs, mangroves) and large grazers and predators, and by what these dynamics mean for marine management in a changing climate. Her group combines field and lab experiments with new technologies such as eDNA, acoustics, drones, machine learning, and autonomous monitoring, and develops indicators for biodiversity recovery. The central question: where and how can we rewild coastal ecosystems so they become more resilient?
From 2018 to 2026, she was an Associate Professor and led the marine subgroup of the Aquatic Ecology and Water Quality Management Group at Wageningen University. After her PhD (2013) on seagrass and sea turtle ecology in Indonesia, she worked as a researcher at the University of Groningen and Radboud University Nijmegen on food web ecology, coastal restoration, and megafauna tracking, with fieldwork in the Caribbean, the North Sea, and the Wadden Sea. In 2017, she served as a scientific advisor at the ecological consultancy Bureau Waardenburg.
She aims to deliver sound science for the responsible management of coastal seas and actively shares it through media, teaching, art, and close collaboration with nature managers and policymakers.

For current and finalized projects see link "contact person for" on this page.

Scopus (Research ID, coupled to Orcid) | Google Scholar | LinkedIn | Research website | Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5839-2981