Promotion Ruben Fijn at the University of Amsterdam

Ruben Fijn, team leader of Bird Ecology at Waardenburg Ecology, has been responsible for various lines of research on sandwich terns within our office since 2009. Together with a large group of colleagues, he has published various Waardenburg reports and scientific articles on this iconic Dutch seabird. In recent years, he has worked on a dissertation in which this knowledge comes together. On October 10, 2024, he defended this dissertation in the Agnietenkapel in Amsterdam.

The Netherlands is one of the most important habitats for sandwich terns. Using more than 300 transmitters and 5,000 colour rings, Ruben extensively mapped the flight behaviour of this bird species for the first time. The aim of the thesis was on the one hand to collect fundamental knowledge about the movements of sandwich terns and on the other hand to apply this knowledge to determine the interaction between sandwich terns and anthropogenic developments at sea, such as offshore wind turbines.

In his thesis, Ruben presents a total of eleven chapters in four parts. Part I describes the quest to develop new methods to track terns and simultaneously study their prey. In Part II, these methods are used to study the habitat use of sandwich terns during the breeding season. With these data, he was also able to predict where sandwich terns occur from colonies for which no data are available. Part III investigates the movement outside the breeding season. Finally, Part IV presents the effect of offshore wind turbines on the flight behaviour of sandwich terns. In the synthesis of his thesis, Ruben summarizes all the findings and discusses what tern tracking can teach us about the foraging ecology of seabirds, how our results can be used, and future directions of tern tracking and seabird tracking in general.

It is exceptional that a researcher from an ecological consultancy firm obtains a PhD from a university. This dissertation proves the scientific value of the work that Waardenburg Ecology carries out. It also shows that scientific research is not exclusively reserved for universities and institutes. With the right guidance from these institutions, agencies such as Waardenburg Ecology can also contribute. But universities naturally play a crucial facilitating role. In Ruben's case, his UvA supervisor, Prof. Dr. Judy Shamoun-Baranes, played an important pioneering role in this.

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Promotion Announcement:

Listen here to an interview with Ruben at radio program Vroege Vogels (in Dutch)