Anders Nielsen
Founder
Dr. Anders Nielsen is one of the founding members of WaterWebTools. He is responsible for seeding development concepts prior to implementation, while co-managing execution of long-term strategies. Moreover, he is involved in IoT-initiatives from ideation to actual implementation as a field engineer.
an@waterwebtools.com | +45 21 56 61 48
Biography
Dr. Nielsen is an environmental engineer with a Ph.D. from Aarhus University specialized in hydrodynamic and biogeochemical modelling of aquatic systems and watersheds. His research focuses on water, nutrients, and state-of-the-system water quality dynamics influenced by changes in climate and land use. He is currently a senior researcher at Aarhus University in the lab run by fellow WaterWebTools founder, Dr. Dennis Trolle.
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Dr. Nielsen is the lead developer and author of the world renowned QWET model interface (www.wet.au.dk), which enables easy operation of an otherwise complex hydrodynamic-ecosystem model. QWET can be applied in integrated water resources management, as it facilitates coupling between watershed and reservoir/lake dynamics, and also allows quantification of total daily maximum load (TDML). Led by Dr. Nielsen, QWET has been published in several high-ranking scientific journals, and also integrated in several teaching programs at university level. Consequently, QWET is now one of the world’s most recognized tools for research and management of lakes and reservoirs, and is used by both research groups and large consultancy firms that operate at global scale.
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Dr. Nielsen received his M.Sc. in Environmental Engineering from Aalborg University in Denmark in 2008’s and continued in the private sector as engineering consultant targeting environmental restoration and management. He completed his Ph.D. on climate and land use change impacts on freshwater lakes in 2013, part of it abroad in China. In the last year of his Ph.D. he was head-hunted to the private sector to co-lead environmental impact assessments of large scale offshore wind projects as a part of the green transition in Denmark. Since 2015, Dr. Nielsen has been employed at Aarhus University. His career has been devoted to interactively develop, apply, and utilize various hydrodynamic lake ecosystem models and watershed models (such as SWAT). Furthermore, he has developed statistical-based lake models and more recently also machine learning frameworks. Dr. Nielsen believes that models, while acknowledging their limitations, are crucial instruments to push and expand our understanding of the behaviors and fundamentals of these systems. Equally important, models may also act as virtual laboratories to assess adaptive ways forward for our scare water resources under pressures from changes in climate and land use, not least by utilizing operational forecast opportunities and IoT data assimilation as empowered through the ASAP platform.
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