J. van Leeuwen
PhD-student
I graduated last year on Forest and Nature Conservation, here at Wageningen University. During my master (and bachelor) I took mostly ecological courses, since my interests are mainly ecology, animal ecology and plant-animal interactions. For my first master thesis I focused on the effect of water availability, shade and herbivory on Prosopis (tree)seedlings and the natural diet of the herbivorous lizard Dicrodon guttulatum in semiarid Peru. My second thesis was based at Alterra, where I studied the genetic diversity of the viper (Vipera berus) in the Netherlands.
I have started as a PhD-student on the SoilTrEC project, working from the ecological angle, under supervision of Peter de Ruiter, Lia Hemerik and Jaap Bloem (Alterra). It’s an European project focused on understanding soil transformations leading towards sustainable use. A number of locations in Europe are studied, with soils going from newly formed at the base of a glacier in Switzerland to highly degraded soils on Crete, Greece. My personal focus will be on the role of the below-ground food web in soil processes (e.g. respiration, mineralization), by use of direct measurements in the lab and developing a food web model based on these, with the ultimate goal of linking this model to other (hydrological, carbon-cycle) models in the project.
For my project, see here.