The landscape consists of various types of farming, including flower growing and dairy farming. Dunes shield the landscape to the east while urban areas are scattered throughout the region.
The area in between Egmond aan den Hoef and Wimmenum has a rich history which becomes visible through it’s heritage sites. Preserving these locations and their qualities play an important role in the innerboezem landscape design.
One of the biggest problems within the area is the lack of connections between the towns, vacation homes, dunes and it’s cultural herritage sites.
The water system also faces mayor pollution challenges. Currently, clean dune water seeps into the agriculture where it gets contaminated with pestices, largely from the flower bulb industry. This contaminated water get’s pumped out of the polder, into the current boezem system.
In order to make sure the clean dune water gets used as sustainably as possible, it’s crucial to first make sure the agriculture reduces it’s water usage as much as possible. By constantly measuring soil moisture content before irrigating, using drip irrigation and adding ground cover to prevent evaporation, water usage can be reduced by roughly 50%.
Secondly, the agriculture industry should reuse some of it’s water by sending it through a wetland filter. This wetland filter gets rid of some of the nutrients and plant diseases. This wetland filter isn’t able to filter out pesticides which gives the agriculture industry an incentive to reduce their pesticide usage.
Only after the agriculture industry reduces and reuses it’s water, reservoir water can be used to refill the agricultural polders with clean dune water.
Water from the continuous seepage underneath the dunes will be used during dry seasons in summer for watering agriculture and refilling polders. This fluctuation of water height results in creating different spatial athmospheres in the park. New paths, connections and spaces emerges and vanishes throughout the year.
The amount of soil that has to be dug outto create these wetlands will be reusedby creating little hills and a dyke near theherenweg. This way, the soil doesn’t have to betransported a long distance.
To filter the agriculture water, a free watersurface constructed wetland is used. Thewater gets pumped up about two meters,goes through an imhoff tank to filter outbigger particles and flows downward throughthe filter.
As the water flows through the system, theamount of nutrients in the water decrease,creating a gradient from a nutrient rich to anutrient poor ecosystem.
The wooden bridges throughout the park offer a perfect opportunity to observe the fluctuations in water levels and the functioning of the water filter up-close.