Louis Vernooij started working with the NIOO institute in march 2007. He believes to have found the ideal job for him, which means working part of the year outside in nature as field assistant and the rest inside working on the research database.
During the fieldseason Louis is currently collecting the data of breeding birds in the Oosterhout forest and also assists in other areas. At the moment there are ten large areas in which field data of breeding birds is collected and also the experimental data from (climate) aviaries and test facilities of the research institute is put into the database. All collected field and experimental data is used in the long term NIOO research project on great tits (Parus major). The project is as young as Louis (1955 onwards) and is like him not yet finished!
Having build years of experience in mainly large customer and marketing/retaildatabases at a big Dutch department store in Amsterdam, Louis now rules and develops the largest long term great tits family database world wide. Actually the research database has lately seen a large transition and is currently upgraded for future related research programs.
It's Louis's aim to get a full relational research database on Animal ecology.
He enjoys that the institute is situated in the nice town of Wageningen, his steady hometown where his family lives, he keeps his honey bees and where he also graduated from university way back in the mid 80’s.