Human-induced subsidence threatens many coastal-deltaic plains, due to the amplifying effects it has on sea-level rise and flood risk. In the coastal-deltaic plain of the Netherlands, subsidence is primarily caused by the compression and oxidation of Holocene peat. The understanding of subsidence in the Netherlands and the capacity to model and predict it for future management scenarios greatly benefit from methods that enable physical property mapping of subsurface peat layers, which are examined in this thesis. The objectives were to 1) reconstruct provisioned accommodation space during the Holocene build-up of the coastal-deltaic plain, 2) develop new approaches to reconstruct and quantify the amount of subsidence that peat experienced due to compression, 3) characterize in-situ physical properties of peat with various degrees of compression, 4) upscale field and laboratory measurements to 3D maps, and 5) use this to predict future subsidence for scenarios of groundwater-level lowering. Approximately 94 km3 of accommodation space was created in the back-barrier wetland of the coastal-deltaic plain. 54 km3 (57 %) of this volume was provisioned prior to the formation of a back-barrier peat layer, and 40 km3 (43 %) during its formation. In urbanized areas this peat layer is overlain with maximal 8 m of overburden and subsided up to 6 m during by compression. In agricultural areas, where overburden is less thick, it subsided between <1 - 3 m. In total, 12 % of the peat layer its volume is lost due to human-induced peat compression. This thesis shows that CPT is a promising method to determine the compression of peat. When peat fibers are progressively packed tighter together, higher resistances are provided by the peat beds to the penetrating cone. Net cone resistance increases by 0.3 MPa, when compression of surficial buried peat reduces their thickness by about 40 % and void ratio decreases from 10 to 6. A 3D map showed that Holocene peat in the Netherlands consist of 1.5 km3 of organic matter, 0.4 km3 of ...