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What an extraordinary week at hashtag#ISBW15_WSC, “the largest gathering of hashtag#seagrass experts on the planet,” in beautiful Naples! 🌿🌍 Great seagrass research, seagrass!, delicious food, an amazing venue, and lovely people (photos below):

🚀 Field Project in Marine Sciences: Mission Accomplished! 🌊 122 dedicated Wageningen University & Research students immersed themselves in both ecological and social marine fieldwork techniques, analyzing the intricate socio-ecological system around Texel

Wrapping up three productive fieldwork weeks in Eleuthera, The Bahamas. During this time, we kicked off Delphine Carroll ‘s MSc. project on seagrass-turtle-shark interactions and established a fruitful collaboration with Nicholas Higgs and the incredible team at the Cape Eleuthera Institute.

Does deep learning and coding deter you from using it? As ecologists, we experienced that too, but we have dived in. In our new paper, led by Rebecca James, we employed deep learning to automate the analysis of aerial drone imagery to assess spatial patterns within subtidal #seagrass meadows and the distribution of turtles UNDERWATER 🌊🐢.

Now you can try deep learning on your own system because we provide accessible, open-access tools to automatically classify vegetation and animals in aerial imagery.

🌿🚁 Paper highlights:

Looking for the next best thing to study? Tropical seascapes often consist of interlinked mangroves-seagrass-coral ecosystems but they are rarely investigated together! In this new review led by Sara Pino Cobacho, we identified key research questions that need to be addressed regarding biogeochemical connectivity in tropical seascapes;

Written by Fee: “👩‍🎓 🌱 What a day! Last Friday I defended my thesis ‘Herbivores shape the seascape’ at Wageningen University & Research. I was totally overwhelmed to get the designation ‘cum laude’ added to my degree. Many thanks to

🎓Great start to 2024: ✨I have been promoted to Associate Professor 1 with tenure at Wageningen University & Research✨. This promotion comes with the “ius promovendi,” granting the right to supervise PhD candidates as a promotor. A huge thank you to my family, talented students, colleagues, friends and collaborators for their unwavering support that made this possible! Looking forward to diving into new marine ecology challenges✨

Handing over the printed thesis copy is a very happy moment in a PhD and supervisors’ collaboration🎓. Sincere congratulations to Sara Pino Cobacho with her thesis “Mangroves in a transforming world: biogeochemical interactions, global change drivers, and innovative mitigation strategies,” a journey with much-needed persistence into fascinating hashtag#mangroves 🌍🌿.

Just 2 weeks ago, we kicked off the exciting new BSc program in Marine Systems at WUR, we’re thrilled to have 110 students on board! This program beautifully combines food, nature, society, and personal development. A big