Biodiversity & Macroecology

Studying geo-ecosystems and the distribution of life on Earth

Biodiversity & Macroecology

The Biodiversity & Macroecology (BIOMAC) lab is a research group at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), the Netherlands. We are part of the Department Theoretical and Computational Ecology (TCE) within the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED). The central aim of our work is to quantify how biodiversity varies across space and time, how it interacts with the abiotic components of the Earth system, and how responses of species and ecosystems to changing environmental conditions can be predicted and forecasted.

The group comprises permanent staff members (associate and assistant professors), support staff, scientific developers, data scientists, postdoctoral researchers and PhD students. We work at the interface of ecology, Earth science, informatics and data science, and cover topics in biodiversity, geodiversity, conservation, physical geography, monitoring, policy and global biodiversity change. Please read more about our research and our teaching, have a look at our news page, or get in touch with our lab members.

Selected publications

  • Polman, E.M.N., Seijmonsbergen, A.C., Versteegh, H. & Kissling, W.D. (2024): Global geodiversity components are not equally represented in UNESCO Global Geoparks. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 382: 20230054. [ABSTRACT] [DATA]

  • Gonzalez, A., ..., Kissling, W.D., ...(2023): A global biodiversity observing system to unite monitoring and guide action. Nature Ecology & Evolution 7: 1947–1952. [ABSTRACT] [PRESS RELEASE]

  • Kissling, W.D., Shi, Y., Koma, Z., Meijer, C., Ku, O., Nattino, F., Seijmonsbergen, A.C. & Grootes, M.W. (2022): Laserfarm — A high-throughput workflow for generating geospatial data products of ecosystem structure from airborne laser scanning point clouds. Ecological Informatics 72: 101836. [ABSTRACT]

  • Zhao, Z., Koulouzis, S., Bianchi, R., Farshidi, S., Shi, Z., Xin, R., Wang, Y., Li, N., Shi, Y., Timmermans, J. & Kissling, W.D. (2022): Notebook-as-a-VRE (NaaVRE): from private notebooks to a collaborative cloud virtual research environment. Software: Practice and Experience 52: 1947–1966. [ABSTRACT] [Featured Cover]

  • Allan, J.R., Possingham, H.P., Atkinson, S.C., Waldron, A., Di Marco, M., Butchart, S.H.M., Adams, V.M., Kissling, W.D., Worsdell, T., Sandbrook, C., Gibbon, G., Kumar, K., Mehta, P., Maron, M., Williams, B.A., Jones, K.R., Wintle, B.A., Reside, A.E. & Watson, J.E.M. (2022): The minimum land area requiring conservation attention to safeguard biodiversity. Science 376: 1094–1101. [ABSTRACT] [PERSPECTIVE] [PRESS RELEASE]

News

EBV workflow templates available

2024-04-19

The EuropaBON EBV workflow templates are now available from the Zenodo repository.

Read more


Events

di11feb

Netherlands Annual Ecology Meeting 2025

Lunteren - The Netherlands

Each year in February, the Netherlands Ecological Research Network (NERN) organises her annual conference, the Netherlands Annual Ecology Meeting (NAEM). This conference is particularly geared towards people working in the field of ecology and/or evolution. It aims to strengthen the network of ecologists in the Netherlands, Belgium, and surrounding countries and provides an overview of the work carried out by the people in the network. The NAEM meeting is two full days. See details here.