Exposition: 70 years of ecology

Welcome to this exposition full of stories and highlights of seventy years of ecology at NIOO-KNAW. Take a look and find out how research methods have changed over time, from punch cards to online databases and from spending hours counting microscopic entities to getting help from artificial intelligence.

Laboratory equipment

On the top shelves you find various types of laboratory equipment, and among it a microscope, of course. Microscopes of this type were used to examine water and soil samples. Species had to be identified and counted by hand. This process would take hours. Nowadays much time is saved by the new microscopes that are used. They are equipped with automatic optical systems, high-tech cameras and algorithms trained through deep learning that can count species like nematodes or red blood cells faster and more accurately than humans ever will.

Bird research

In the middle of the display case you will find various elements used in research on birds. NIOO-researchers have spent decades looking into breeding habits of great tits (70 years) and avian migration (>110 years). Citizens are involved in the research on avian migration too. In the past, they would send rings they had found to “Vogeltrekstation Arnhem”. Now observations are reported to GRIEL, the online ringing database of the Dutch Centre for Avian Migration and Demography (Vogeltrekstation). These ringing data constitute the basis for the Vogeltrekatlas, an online interface to view the migration movements, and breeding and wintering habits of millions of birds.

Freshwater research

Freshwater research has a long history at NIOO as well. Admire the water flow meter from the 1970s at the bottom of the wide display case. Many lakes and drinking water reservoirs around the world experience dense cyanobacterial blooms each summer that form a pertinent risk to human health. Cyanobacterial risk assessment is traditionally based on weekly sampling followed by fluorescence measurements and microscopic inspection in the laboratory. Currently, solar-powered measuring buoys generate nearly real-time date by performing fluorescence measurements every ten minutes. This new method allows for faster response times and improved risk assessment.

Data storage

The changes in all of these research lines are based on digitisation. The changes allow for increasingly large and efficient data storage. In the 1960s punch cards were common for data registration and storage. They were then sent to the computing centre were they were processed with an IBM computer. It could take up to 24 hours to get the results back. In the 1970s data storage could be done on a hard disk drive already, storing about 5GB. A diversification of data storage methods arose in the 1990s: floppydisks, diskettes, mini cartridges, and the introduction of the SSD to replace hard disk drives. In the early 2000s CDs became popular, and later USB flash drives: this small piece of hardware can store up to 1 terabyte of data. With the arrival of cloud storage and cloud computing USB flash drives have become less popular today.

Do you know more? Let us know

If there are items in the exposition that you have worked with yourself or if you want to give some more information, feel free to send any additions to communicatie@nioo.knaw.nl.