Nico Helmsing

Ing. Nico R. Helmsing graduated from the Hogeschool Larenstein in 2003. Where he studied laboratory techniques and specialized in environmental analysis. In his final thesis at the Department of Aquatic Food Webs at the NIOO-KNAW Centre for Limnology he investigated the defensive strategies of algae of the Scenedesmus and Desmodesmus genera to herbivory by the rotifer Brachionus calyciflorus. After that he worked for 5 months on a project called 'Inducible Defenses’ and from July 2003 he is employed at the Department of Aquatic Food Webs. His main tasks are chemical analyses of samples i.e. nutrients, stable isotope analysis and metals analysis.
He is responsible for Limnotron-, micro- and aquarium facilities as well as the experimental rooms. In the years working at NIOO he has acquired experience with different types of aquatic ecological experiments, ranging from running microcosm and Limnotron experiments to small scale batch experiments as well as flow-though and chemostat experiments.