SLM MIL internships and theses

If interested in doing thesis research (major or minor) with SLM then you’ll find all the required information on this page. We offer a great variety of topics within our two main domains:

  1. Topics for Soil Physics & Processes, with research focused on understanding and modelling processes in land and water conservation, as well as developing new methods, techniques and equipment to measure physical aspects of land and water in lab and field.

  2. Topics for Land Management & Society, with research focused on driving forces and impact for farmers and society of land degradation, as well as solutions and (designing) measures to move towards sustainable land management worldwide.

Several of the offered thesis topics combine physical/technical aspects of land and water management with more socioeconomic aspects. So check out all topics and contact us for more information!In the following links you’ll find all the information and documents you need to guide you through the process of a MSc thesis research supervised by SLM:

    For more information about MIL thesis research within the SLM Group and for planning and intake please contact michel.riksen@wur.nl

    Students' review

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    MSc. Roxane Bradaczek

    I wrote my thesis on farmer’s motivation to conserve traditional agricultural landscapes in the Mediterranean and how they could be supported by policy. Therefore, I carried out qualitative semi-structured farmer interviews in Cinque Terre and Soave (Italy). The thesis was carried out in collaboration with the University of Padova (UNIPD), where I spent four months as an ERASMUS thesis intern. I was incredibly thankful for the opportunity to go abroad and do some fieldwork within my thesis even during the challenging times of COVID. Looking back, I find having seen different landscape realities and having spoken to farmers about their actual daily struggles in landscape conservation of crucial importance to start my life as a young professional. The impressions that I have gotten in the field have manifested my motivation to engage with the conservation of landscapes and, I am sure, will be an important point of reference for my work for many years to come. Luckily, the team of the UNIPD took me along also on other field trips and I was encouraged to my WUR supervisor to join a conference related to my topic, so that I got to see and learn a lot of things about Italy's landscapes that exceed the scope of my own two study sites. I was also given a lot of freedom in the choice of my topic and methods by my supervisors from both the WUR and the UNIPD, which was great to try myself out and follow my heart!