After my BASc in wildlife management and Msc in forest and nature conservation in the Netherlands I am excited to do my PhD in Germany at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen. During my bachelors I studied multiple species groups, but reptiles and amphibians were -and might still be- my favorite groups. During my master’s degree at Wageningen university I shifted towards insects. I studied the habitat quality of the alcon blue for my thesis, and did a research practice on the effect of mass flowering crops, buckwheat in this case, on wild bees and hoverflies.
Here in Göttingen I will continue to study wild pollinators (wild bees and hoverflies) within the KOOPERATIV project. Within this project I will focus on the effect of agricultural biodiversity measures in the form of native perennial flower fields on wild pollinators. The establishment of wild pollinators in these flower fields will be one of my subjects. Our study design allows me to study the interaction effect of the biodiversity measures and the context of the landscape on wild bees and hoverflies. Furthermore, I will look at oilseed rape within the same framework of pollinators and landscape context. Lastly, I will study the development of the number of brown bumblebee colonies in the landscape.
My main interests are wild pollinator ecology, agricultural landscape and biodiversity, insect pollination services, plant pollinator interactions, plant ecology, and reptiles and amphibians.