About us
The effects of climate change and biodiversity loss are being felt worldwide. Despite the available biodiversity knowledge and the many organisations aiming for nature conservation, the Netherlands suffers more biodiversity loss than most European countries. To translate the increasing political need to stop further biodiversity loss and work towards solutions, governments and industry in the Netherlands (and Europe) urgently need up-to-date knowledge on all facets of biodiversity and supporting data. This requires a radical new integrated approach to monitoring technologies, new monitoring and assessment tools, and more scientific research.
Naturalis is in the middle of this development. We host one of the world's largest and most important natural history collections, a physical reference collection with unlimited potential for biodiversity research. We enhance our digital collection with digital twins, broadening our specimen based digitization concept with species-based digitization activities. We build a national research infrastructure that will enable science to identify species faster, monitor them more easily and gain better insights into interaction networks and ecosystems. The scientific results will enable the government and companies to better protect biodiversity in the Netherlands.
We are, therefore, expanding our scientific research on Dutch species in the coming years, focusing in particular on research integrating molecular techniques, imaging techniques and data science (AI) to enhance species recognition and detection. Naturalis wants to be able to identify and monitor all Dutch species. This means we face the exciting challenge to accelerate the discovery, identification, and description of species in our soil, rivers, sea and air that so far have escaped our attention. With ARISE, eDentity and Noordzeker we will have the conditional infrastructural building blocks and facilities to build the research infrastructure. Still a lot of scientific research needs to be done to integrate the building blocks into a fully operational research infrastructure and to develop it towards a radical new approach of discovering, identifying and monitoring all Dutch species in a way that can be scaled to include European or even global biodiversity.
Positions
We are seeking two ambitious, enthusiastic, innovative scientists to strengthen our research on Dutch species, actively supporting the development of our national research infrastructures. We will challenge you to develop your leadership skills and to set up your own line of research. You will be expected to acquire project funding for new research, participate in outreach activities and mentor PhD students and postdocs.
