Producing tailor made-fertilizer from steering cultivation conditions of photogranules

Our night sky is heavily light-polluted which has a far-reaching impact on our ecosystem, changing daily and seasonal timing of a multitude of organisms we share our environment with. At the NIOO-KNAW, we team up with ecologists and chronobiologists all across the Netherlands to restore healthy rhythms for ourselves and in our natural environment.

Innovation ability allows animals to invent plastic behavioural responses to various novel ecological challenges, thereby making it possible to exploit new resources. Until now, studies have generally focused on innovation ability as a factor on its own and very little is known about how various cognitive and behavioural traits co-operate in their effect on innovation ability. These traits may be cognitive and behavioural specializations, meaning they have evolved for specific functions other than innovation, but act together to allow animals to innovate. The behavioural and cognitive traits that may affect innovation ability will vary between species and between populations of the same species living in different environments. My main purpose in this project is to try, by as many means as possible, to pinpoint core differences between innovators and non-innovators. I aim to do this by making both inter- and intraspecific comparisons of performance in cognitive and behavioural essays in three species from Paridae family.

This project will help us to predict the limits for species to adapt to changes in habitat characteristics, which is especially important in the light of actual ecological impacts of habitat changes worldwide.

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