Résumé

Floris Reinier Calkoen

Coastal Science | Earth Observation | Cloud-Native Coastal Monitoring

I'm a coastal scientist with a PhD and a broad background in geology, philosophy, data science, and marine sciences, specializing in Earth Observation and cloud-native coastal monitoring. Over the years I have learned how to apply new technologies at scale, for example by using AI to map the world's coast from petabytes of satellite imagery. I co-developed the web portal for CoCliCo, an EU Horizon 2020 project on coastal climate services, and currently run Rocksanne, a coastal project of my own in southwest Portugal. I'm experienced in scientific publishing and in writing open-source research software. I like to think about how big, diverse geospatial data can be turned into products that inform policymakers. I try to work on things I believe in; at the moment I'm especially interested in coastal monitoring, because I think observations will only become more important for coastal management and climate adaptation. I sometimes advise on geospatial information systems. I value working with people, and have lived and worked on several continents.

Professional Experience

Self-employed | Rocksanne | May 2026 – Present

Experiment with coastal monitoring and compare the results with observations in the field.
Organize guided coastal walks along the Costa Vicentina, Portugal.
Write about the region’s geology and build the website and web apps that go with it.

PhD Researcher | Deltares & Delft University of Technology | 2021–2026

Developed a scalable, cloud-native framework to analyze petabytes of satellite imagery, and used it with deep learning to map the world’s coast.
Assessed the worldwide impacts of future coastal erosion under different scenarios of sea-level rise, looking beyond erosion as a natural process to where it becomes a risk to society.
Co-developed the cloud data infrastructure for the EU Horizon 2020 CoCliCo project on coastal climate services that serves data products to users from practitioners to policymakers.

International Research Stays

U.S. Geological Survey, Santa Cruz (USA) | Visiting researcher | Dec 2023 – Jan 2024: global coastal classification using satellite imagery and deep learning.
Water Research Laboratory, UNSW Sydney (Australia) | Visiting researcher | Dec 2022 – Jan 2023: methods for mapping shorelines from satellite imagery.
Instituto Dom Luiz, University of Lisbon (Portugal) | Research intern | 2019: decades of coastal change along the Portuguese coast from satellite data, shared in an interactive web map.

Competencies & Skills

Professional Skills

Entrepreneurship: Running Rocksanne, a small business: guided walks, writing, the website, and the administration.
Research: A PhD in Coastal Science, studying coastal erosion not only as a natural process but also assessing its potential future impacts now that sea levels are rising.
Early adopter: Especially interested in combining the latest technologies with observations in the field.
Communication: Conference talks and convening an AGU session; teaching at TU Delft, including the CoastalCodebook, and supervising MSc students.
Collaboration: Several years of work with partners across Europe in the EU Horizon 2020 CoCliCo project.

Technical Skills

Coastal monitoring: Shoreline mapping, coastal erosion analysis, and coastal classification from satellite data (Landsat, Sentinel, ICESat-2).
Geospatial data: Python (Xarray, Dask, Pandas, DuckDB), Open Data Cube, Pangeo, Google Earth Engine, Microsoft Planetary Computer; cloud-optimized formats (Parquet, COG, Zarr) and STAC.
Cloud & development: AWS, Azure, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, basic web development.
Machine learning: From traditional machine learning (Scikit-learn) to deep learning for image classification (PyTorch, Lightning), including experiment tracking (Wandb).
Fieldwork: Several multi-week geological fieldwork campaigns in Spain.

Education

PhD in Coastal Science | Delft University of Technology & Deltares
MSc in Data Science | University of Amsterdam
MSc in Marine Environment and Resources | Erasmus Mundus Consortium
BA in Philosophy | Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
BSc in Earth Science (Geology) | Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Selected Publications

Calkoen (2026). Living by the coast with accelerating sea-level rise. Doctoral Thesis, TU Delft.
Calkoen et al. (2025). Mapping the world’s coast. ESSD Discussions.
Calkoen et al. (2025). Enabling coastal analytics at planetary scale. Env. Modelling & Software.

Grants & Awards

TU Delft Education Innovation Projects Grant (2024)
TU Delft Open Education Stimulation Fund Grant (2023)
Prof. Collins Award for Best EMMER MSc Thesis Presentation (2019)
Erasmus+ Traineeship Grant (2019)
Erasmus Mundus / MER Consortium Scholarship (2018 & 2019)
VSBfonds Scholarship (2017)

Languages

Dutch (native), English (fluent), Spanish (good working knowledge), Portuguese (basic), French (basic)

References are available upon request.

For more detail, see my Curriculum Vitae.