Antica Culina

Antica’s expertise covers evolutionary ecology of bonding, life-history trade offs, evidence synthesis, and data and code standards. She strives to apply her knowledge of different modelling approaches to inform wildlife conservation decisions. She is one of the pioneers in studying and promoting Open Science practices in ecological and evolutionary research.

Antica has worked on a variety of free-living animal populations, but the majority of her work has been based on long-term studies of great tits, including the project she currently leads on the stability of bonds between breeding partners. Within this project, she has initiated SPI-Birds Network and Database. She has finished undergrad degree in Ecology, worked on bird conservation projects in Croatia (NGO BIOM) before moving to the Oxford University for her PhD.

Antica acts as Scientific Advisor to Open Knowledge Maps and Go FAIR Implementation Network. More info here: https://nioo.knaw.nl/en/employees/antica-culina

 

 

Marcel E. Visser

Marcel is the head of the Animal Ecology Department at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) and he is widely recognized as a world-leading expert on the ecological and evolutionary impact of anthropogenic environmental changes. His pioneering research on how climate change disrupts natural systems used long-term studies on wild species. The work he led on how climate change leads to phenological mismatches within food chains has turned his model species, the great tit, into the poster child for climate change impact. His work on wild long-term populations is complemented with studies in aviaries, and by genomic work, among which the sequencing of the great tit genome.

Marcel combines fieldwork, aviary work and molecular techniques in single projects, for instance by using genomic selection to create selection lines for timing of reproduction in great tit, and then use these lines to look at epigenetic regulation of gene expression as well as to measure fitness consequences of timing in the wild. He is managing the four long-term study populations of hole-nesting species that have ran at the NIOO from 1955 onwards.

Marcel has been awarded a NWO-VICI and an ERC Advanced grant, and has been elected as a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW). He is co-founder and inaugural president of the Netherlands Society for Evolutionary Biology (NLSEB). More info here: https://nioo.knaw.nl/en/employees/marcel-visser.