In 2021 I was happy to be involved in the making of a documentary with Artist Mirthe Dokter, together with Rian van den Boom and others. This unconventional docu shows an intriguing portrait of the leatherback sea turtle, threatened with extinction. In Ghana, artist Mirthe meets ‘Uncle Raf’, the leader of a turtle conservationists team …
Author Archives: Marjolijn
Restoring Bonaire’s seagrasses and mangroves a checkerboard at a time
Seagrass and Mangroves on Bonaire can use a helping hand. Water quality, tourists (trampling), Sargassum tides and more, have caused rapid decline of seagrasses and mangroves. Based on results from an earlier pilot, last week we launched a larger scale seagrass restoration project to help counter this decline. And also set up pilots to test …
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Fish can protect ecosystems from invasive seagrass
One grazer is not like another. Where sea turtle grazing gives way to invasive eelgrass, fish grazing has the opposite effect. “Protected areas with abundant native grazing fish may be more resistant to expansion of invasive eelgrass.
Savannas of the sea: “Pristine seagrass meadows were often heavily grazed”
WUR press release: Seagrasses are important for our coastal protection, biodiversity and carbon sequestration. But contrary to popular belief, dense, waving seagrass meadows with long foliage are not necessarily more natural. In a new publication in Nature Ecology & Evolution, researchers from Wageningen University & Research and Radboud University argue for a more nuanced picture …
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The price turtles pay for your perfect vacation photo
Unregulated feeding of marine wildlife by tour operators impacts the natural behavior & well-being of sea #turtles. So proud that @FeeSmulders paper (w/ @CORE_Science3, Justin Campbell and myself) is now featured in @nytimes (read this here) photo @ShaneGrossPhoto. Also see the video abstract and WUR press release below.
ReViFES fieldwork North Sea
Cruise participants: The wonderful crew of RV Pelagia and scientists from NIOZ – Christina Coral PhD student and Rob Witbaard; Bureau Waardenburg – Joost Bergsma; and WUR Joop Coolen ands myself + others How to better start the academic year than with some hardcore fieldwork
Can we improve coastal restoration by temporarily imitating nature? Yes we can!
Coastal ecosystems are in rapid decline around the world. Restoring them is very expensive and is often unsuccessful. But together with an international team of researchers we discovered a way of increasing restoration success of salt marshes and seagrass meadows, using biodegradable mats. Our findings are just published in Nature Communications (22 July 2020)
The corona version of a Field-based course “Introduction Marine Ecology”
Six weeks before the start of our course our Dutch prime minister announced that the Netherlands was going into lock down in response of the global COVID19 pandemic. to prevent study delay for WUR students we decided the course to continue – in contrast to other field courses that were cancelled – and put all …
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Turtle tracking story map released at Dutch Caribbean Sea Turtle workshop
Story map
Turtle cams & seagrass experiments in the Bahamas & Bonaire
In november Fee Smulders and I visited the Islands Bonaire and Eleuthera (Bahamas) to study the impact of grazing on seagrass ecosystem services. We look back at a very productive, and fun field trip, where we sampled and initiated multiple experiments.