Partner overview
Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences
The Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS)has a long (more than 150 years) and outstanding track record of integrated investigations in different biogeographical regions. The main expertise of its more than 100 pre- and postdoctoral researchers (40 permanent scientific staff) lies in animal taxonomy, biodiversity and ecology. The group’s research focuses on evolutionary ecology of freshwater meiobenthic organisms and has extensive expertise in classical limnological work on meiobenthos.
The Belgian Biodiversity Platform (BBPF) is a distributed biodiversity information and communication initiative by the Belgian Science Policy (BelSPO). It serves as Belgian node to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the European Platform on Biodiversity Science Policy (EPBRS), DIVERSITAS and is involved in the ERA-net BiodivERsA. It develops a database on Belgian biodiversity research resources(BioBel, and coordinates the Freshwater Animal Diversity Assessment project. The BBPF also implements SCAR-MarBIN, the Antarctic marine biodiversity portal of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research. It organizes a yearly call supporting the digitisation of biodiversity information.
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Koen Martens
Koen Martens (PhD, m) has published 11 books, 140+ ISI papers and 310 other
contributions on taxonomy, ecology and evolution of non-marine invertebrates.
He has successfully co-ordinated a TMR research network and is presently
coordinator of a MC-RTN network. He was scientist in charge of previous
individual Marie Curie grants. He was co-PI of an EU-INCO project
on Lake Malawi, and is promoter of the Belgian
Biodiversity at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. Martens is
visiting professor at the University
of Ghent (Belgium)
and full professor in animal systematics and zoogeography at the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands, 2003-2004).
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Hendrik Segers
Hendrik Segers (PhD, m) coordinates the
biodiversity-data related initiatives of the Belgian Biodiversity Platform
(BBPF) and as such bears responsibility for the SCAR-MarBIN and FADA projects,
the BBPF digitisation project call, and for the strategy of the data module of
the BBPF. Recently, he was elected to the council of the Society for the
Management of Electronic Biodiversity Data (SMEBD). As a scientist, he
published more than 130 contributions, including 70+ in ISI journals, on
taxonomy, biogeography and biodiversity of freshwater organism.
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Aaike de Wever
Aaike De Wever (PhD, m) is Science Officer for the BioFresh project at the RBINS and will coordinate the data workflow and creation of the public data portal. He is the central contact for data providers and will closely collaborate with the teams at BOKU and WorldFish for technical quality control and digitalization of data. Aaike has a background on aquatic microbial ecology in freshwater environments. For his PhD, he studied the microbial food web in Lake Tanganyika and has experience with challenging experimental field work, molecular ecology and data management. After his PhD, he worked on microbial ecology of Antarctic lakes and teledection of benthic micro-algae on intertidal mudflats.
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Estelle Balian
Estelle Balian (MSc, f) has professional and academic
expertise in river and riparian ecology. She has extensive experience in
biodiversity network coordination through her work with DIVERSITAS and
currently with the Belgian Biodiversity Platform. She is work package leader
for the ERA-NET BiodivERsA, and coordinates the “Freshwater Animal Diversity
Assessment (FADA)” project. She is also active as the secretariat of the
European Platform for Biodiversity Research Strategy (EPBRS).
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