Projects

Rotterdam is Europe’s largest seaport, with imposing offshore installations, staggering amounts of containers, vast petrochemical industries and plenty of activity. Plants and animals also know how to make good use of the open, sparse areas of sandy ground near the coast. Ground-breeding birds such as terns, plovers, oystercatchers and especially gulls reach high numbers there. […]

WAAKVOGELS aims to better understand the effects of recovery measures and interventions in the Wadden Sea region by collecting a type of data and knowledge that is lacking in current monitoring schemes. Based on these monitoring data and historical monitoring series on six carefully chosen bird species, we focus on questions of (specific) management and […]

The research within the NIEWHOL project aims to better understand the effects on populations of bird species vulnerable to mortality and habitat loss caused by wind turbines and high-voltage power lines. The results of the research contribute to preventing and compensating for mortality of vulnerable species, which are species known to be relatively sensitive to […]

Tens of thousands of animals around the world are monitored using GPS trackers to protect wildlife and study animal behaviour. The collected data are also useful for biodiversity research, but are seldom available on platforms used for this purpose. Researchers have developed a workflow to make GPS tracking data available in biodiversity data portals, and […]

Due to its favourable location, the Netherlands harbours at times large numbers of migratory birds, and bears an international responsibility to accommodate them. Many of these birds spend the summer above the Arctic circle. Because climate changes faster in the Arctic than elsewhere, the question arises whether these birds are under threat. In this project, […]

In cooperation with Track32 we developed a computer vision and AI toolkit for phenotyping bird populations. This software toolkit can handle complex datasets, containing both bird images and information from field work and other sources. An important part of the toolkit is a vision algorithm that can segment an image of a bird’s head into […]

One of the best known meadow birds, the Lapwing, is not doing well. From the mid-90s, the number of breeding Lapwings in our country declines rapidly. In the period 2005-2014 even by almost 5 percent per year. That is why 2016 has been declared the Year of Lapwing by Sovon and Bird Protection Netherlands. The […]

Neonicotinoids have received a lot of attention in recent years because of their possible effects on bees and other invertebrates. Imidacloprid is the most widely used worldwide and has consistently been in the top 3 of pesticides that exceed the Dutch standard since 2003. In July 2014, a strong correlation was found between the decline […]