Pollinator Ecology

Pollinators are crucial for the natural environment and for food production – so also for mankind. We aim to use the results of our research directly in societal projects and include citizen science and awareness in our work. Our research activities are a mix of direct (ecological) field studies and of advanced species distribution modelling. Every year, we have multiple students successfully finishing their internships -either contributing to ongoing research or doing their own research on pollinators.

Who
work here

The Pollinator Ecology group is led by prof. Koos Biesmeijer and contains several researchers all working on pollinator projects. We have multiple students doing internships here working on a broad range of subjects diverging from ecological scientific research to testing methods of citizen science. Students learn competences like: species recognition, general fieldwork skills, data analysis using statistics and public outreach skills.

Koos Biesmeijer

Scientific director & group leader Pollinator ecology

Nieke Knoben

Project coordinator

Maarten van 't Zelfde

GIS and database specialist

Lisette van Kolfschoten

Researcher

Aafke Oldenbeuving

PhD

Leon Marshall

Postdoctoral researcher

Lucas Alferink

Guest researcher

Important projects that were done in the past were the Honeybee surveillance project in cooperation with Wageningen University; a 4 year project where we looked at the honeybee health in the Netherlands, Big data for bees, where we organized meetings with experts and participants of the Nationale Bijenstrategie to look for applications for big data. The SuperB project; a European broad network project supported by the EU to maintain a network of bee scientists in over 32 countries.

Species distribution modelling

In the Pollinator Ecology group, species distribution modelling plays a large role as a method in research. ing. Maarten van ‘t Zelfde, Leon Marshall and Jesus Aguirre Gutierrez use this method to make predictions about future distribution of pollinating species. Using this information they are able to advise municipalities in for instance the Nederland zoemt project.