Stefan Vriend

Who am I?

I am an ecologist in training and data- & coding enthusiast in practice. I am the Coordinator Veluwe for LTER-LIFE and the data manager at SPI-Birds Network and Database. 

Coordinating a Veluwe research community for LTER-LIFE

LTER-LIFE is a large-scale research infrastructure and consortium of scientific, educational, and societal partners in the Netherlands. We will build an e-infrastructure to facilitate the development of digital twins of entire ecosystems. Integrating long-term data on species and their environment, expert knowledge, and a wide ray of modelling tools in a virtual catalogue, scientists will be able to use our infrastructure to study how changes in climate and other human-induced pressures affect ecosystems and biodiversity. LTER-LIFE will initially focus on two ecosystems, the Wadden Sea and the Veluwe. As the Coordinator Veluwe, I facilitate collaboration with the user community and the project partners, guide the development of scientific use cases that, and develop trainings, workshops and courses on data and model FAIRification and using the LTER-LIFE infrastructure to build digital twins. 

Connecting bird researchers and their data through SPI-Birds

SPI-Birds is a network of researchers working on populations of breeding, individually marked birds with the aim to improve data accessibility and transparency, and to facilitate collaboration. As part of SPI-Birds, we are building open and robust pipelines for different research groups that output their individual-based breeding bird data in a community-defined standard format. 

Other & past work

Besides my work in LTER-LIFE and SPI-Birds, I am involved in various projects that focus on how ecological processes vary across space, time and species (mostly hole-nesting passerines). One of these projects involves a common garden experiment, which we started in the spring of 2023. Here, we ask the question: to what extent are population differences in fitness-related traits due to varying characteristics of the different nest boxes that researchers use at their study sites rather than differences in their environments?

Previously I worked as a PhD researcher at the Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. My thesis was inspired by the ability of individuals and populations to adapt to an ever-changing environment. Using a unique set of long-term studies on European hole-nesting passerines, I explored the roles of density dependence, through competition within and between species, and environmental fluctuations in affecting and linking ecological and evolutionary processes.