Upcoming events

The agent-based modelling course for beginners will take place at the Forestry Faculty at the University of Göttingen in Germany.

The farm sector is affected by a large and changing set of risk sources including more volatile producer prices, unusual weather patterns, upstream and downstream market power along the value chain, increasing dependence on financial institutions, and political risks. This induces the need for (new) risk management tools. Also the Common Agricultural Policy 2020 is considering risk management as an important component of agricultural policy.

Wageningen University & Research is delighted to invite you to the fourth edition of the Wageningen Soil Conference. As in previous editions, the aim is to discuss the importance of soils. In the 2019 edition, the focus will be on “Understanding soil functions: from ped to planet”. To do this a new style of conference will be adopted, with traditional conference talks in the mornings, followed by a range of scientific and interactive topic masterclasses in the afternoons.

Meeting the agricultural production for a growing world population in a sustainable way poses us for several challenges. Ecological intensification has been proposed to make better use of the natural ecosystem services, while maintaining agricultural production on a high level and counteracting the negative effects of conventional agriculture on biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. In this symposium, international speakers will shed light on some of the aspects on the shift towards ecological intensification. This symposium is free of charge, but registration is needed!

Open to graduate and post-graduate scientists, as well as professionals in related fields, the ALTER-Net Summer School provides an innovative atmosphere for thinking about and resolving the sustainability challenges that society is currently facing. The Summer School aims at contributing to the integration and spread of scientific excellence within and beyond our network--with a special emphasis on promoting interdisciplinary approaches.

On Tuesday September 3rd, the first B-Wise meeting of the new academic year will take place at 12:30h in room C0226 in the Forum building. Lunch will be available from 12:00h onwards. Speakers will be Veronika Laine (Netherlands Institute of Ecology, Animal Ecology) and Raul Wijfjes (WU Bioinformatics). If you would like to join for the (free) lunch at 12:00h, please send an e-mail to lunch@bioinformatics.nl by Sunday, 1st September 1 at the latest.

The 49th Annual Meeting is held under the motto "Science meets practice" and aims to stimulate exchange between the academic ecological community and practitioners in order to find applied solutions to environmental problems. The Local Organising Committee covers a wide range of ecological topics, from classical organismic ecology, nature conservation issues and functional biodiversity research to air quality problems and research on biogeochemical processes in aquatic and terrestrial systems.

This course directly enables participants to develop, operationalise and integrate a critical gender framework into their own research. The manner in which participants work gender into their own research may then be independently replicated in integrating other relevant concerns.

Sedimentology to face societal challenges on risk, resources and record of the past. The ambition is to discuss, compare and promote researches able to cope with the societal changes from the specific perspective of the Sedimentology and Sedimentary Geology. Also for scientists that use reconstruction of sedimentary processes and of stratigraphic record as main investigation tools, such as marine geology, volcanology, extraterrestrial geology, archaeology

The purpose of this day is to inform you about job opportunities at IOs, to increase your knowledge about the organisations, to give practical tips on how to prepare for a job at an IO and to make you enthusiastic about working there. This day is organised by Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and the National Coordinator for International Functions (NCIF).The day will begin with a plenary opening with a brief introduction of the IOs. After this, there will be several break-out sessions. In these sessions, the IOs will talk about their own organisation, how the application procedures work and how you can best prepare for them. Between the break-out sessions there will be master classes on various topics, for example about professionalising a CV. The day will be concluded by a plenary discussion with WUR President Prof. dr. Louise O. Fresco, who has worked at the FAO for ten years. We conclude with a reception.

Human-environment research is the interdisciplinary study of how humans live in, affect, govern, reflect upon and perceive their natural environment, and how, in turn, that environment supports or constrains human life and culture. Researchers are increasingly mandated to engage more actively with politics and the plurality of epistemologies and perspectives on these challenges that exist in society. So, how may human-environment research take an active role in transformative research for and with society? This is the overall question for this summer school which will be addressed by applying science and technology studies (STS) and political ecology perspectives to participants’ own cases as well as getting first hands-on experience with transdisciplinary research methods.

In this meeting, we will discuss Rmarkdown and the reasons why you should use it for writing your papers

In this month’s WEES (Wageningen Evolution & Ecology Seminar), Prof.dr. Erhard Strohm, will give a lecture called 'The secret tricks of the beewolves: how males and females of a digger wasp increase their reproductive success’ This seminar is scheduled for Thursday 19 September 2019 (16:00h) in Orion (room C1040). It is preceded by a workshop entitled ‘How do antimicrobial defenses of insects evolve?’ in Orion C4014 (13.30h). There will be free drinks with the speaker after the seminar in The Spot!

The interdisciplinary training school provides hands-on training in measuring and modelling such sources and transmissions. Common measurement methods, conventional and emerging data analysis approaches as well as emission flow modelling techniques will be presented and discussed by experienced scientists from European and international institutions.

Sustainability is a popular topic nowadays. Compared to just a few years ago, people have an increased awareness about the harm unsustainable practices can have on the environment. Many people are now bringing their own coffee cups and water bottles everywhere, or switching their meat burger for a veggie burger every once in a while. We want to take this as the starting point to answer the question; How do we move from here? How can we ride the sustainability wave and grow with the flow? In this coming TEDx Wageningen University event, we want to focus on three main aspects; Technology Nature Personal development We will do this by showing how new technological innovations can improve sustainability, how we can learn from nature to come up with new solutions and we want to inspire people to build sustainable relations with themselves and others.

This course is organised by the Graduate School EPS. The course gives you insight into the possibilities of electron microscopy as a research tool and will be able to decide whether you should use scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) or combined light and electron microscopy (CLEM) for your analysis.

LaTeX is a document preparation system and markup language which can be used as an alternative to text processors like MS-WORD. This is a free introductory workshop especially aimed at those who have little or no experience working with LaTeX. There will be a theoretical and a hands-on practical part.

This workshop combines a number of oral presentations of world leading horticultural researchers, panel discussions with renowned companies as well as short oral and poster presentations on the latest research results on vertical farming, also called indoor farming or plant factories with artificial light (PFAL). Keynote speakers include: Bruce Bugbee, Erik Runkle, Eri Hayashi, Emiel Wubben, Luuk Graamans, Qichang Yang, Marie-Christine van Labeke, Danny Geelen, Francesco Orsini, Murat Kacira.

Everywhere we go, people are talking about sustainability. But as the use of this term spreads its meaning has become increasingly misused. True sustainability is achieved when the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development and institutional change are all in harmony and guarantee a development which can support itself and meet future needs indefinitely. Environment, economy and society are the three main pillars of sustainability but unfortunately societal and economical welfare are often prioritized over the environment. During the PE&RC Day 2019, we aim to put the environment in the spotlight and discuss its pivotal role in supporting societal and economic demands.

This course is for postdocs and junior tenure track staff who wish to stay in science and must work on developing, formulating and communicating their personal research vision. In addition to developing your research vision, you will learn to effectively communicate your vision. By clearly explaining why you do what you do, you bring both yourself and your research in the limelight. You will feel much more confident when presenting to the tenure track committee, at conferences, in (social) media, and to cooperation partners.

This course is organised by the Graduate school VLAG of Wageningen University. In this course, we aim to introduce participants to techniques for comprehensive data analysis of large, heterogeneous datasets and extract relevant information for elucidating biological design principles. The course is modular and focuses on data generation, mining, analysis, data integration, and visualisation.

The Ecosystem Services Partnership (ESP) will celebrate the 10th world conference anniversary in Germany: 10 years advancing ecosystem services science, policy and practice for a sustainable future. The ESP10 conference locations are the Leibniz University for the opening day on Monday, and the Hannover Congress Centre for the rest of the conference.

Plant phenotyping is becoming the central field of research and application in academia and industry providing a fertile ground for the development of new phenotyping technologies, platforms and methods required to address future grand challenges.

This conference is addressing the question: how do we proceed from here. How do we stop biodiversity loss? How can we speed up our research? How can we predict how climate change will affect global biodiversity? What new science do we need? What new techniques? What new policies?

This event is being curated by the Wageningen PhD Council, with an audience of about 150 PhD students and faculty members in Wageningen. Goal is to bring together early career researchers from across all disciplines to give idea-focused talks that foster learning, inspiration, and wonder – and eventually, provoke conversations that matter.

Iin this workshop we aim to discuss the opportunities and challenges in determining desirable plant traits, including traits that relate to collaboration with soil microbes, and the hurdles in developing breeding programs for plant mixtures. Ultimately the goal will be to define a research agenda for the coming years paving the way for successful breeding for diversity.

This conference organised by Taizhou University, will bring together world-leading experts on current and emergent topics in global change ecology of plants. All scientists and students working on any aspect of global change ecology are welcome.

Post-graduate students and professional doing field research on plant breeding using trials across sites and over years or cropping seasons, particularly those working on the analysis of controlling the inheritance of complex traits

This symposium is a must for everyone who wants to gain more ecological knowledge useful in the assessment of soil eco(toxico) logical effects of chemical and non-chemical stressors, as well as to learn which ecological databases are available as reference for (large-scale) ecological assessments of effects, and to understand which novel experimental and modelling tools are currently available for an effective environmental risk assessment.

We invite you to join us and over 1200 international ecologists in Belfast for Europe’s largest and most influential annual event dedicated to ecology.

This 2-day workshop is aimed at young scientists who have limited or no background in metabolomics. We shall introduce the concept of how to apply metabolomics approaches to plant-based research including: experimental design, the technologies for data generation (LC/GC MS and NMR); data management and (pre)processing; data mining approaches and statistically-sound data interpretation. The workshop is followed by a free symposium on 12 December 2019 on Advances in Plant and Food Metabolomics is an integral part of this workshop and attendance for all three days is obligatory.

Following on from our very successful earlier -omics and genomics symposia, we shall organize on 12 December 2019 a third meeting dedicated to the latest advances and opportunities in plant & food metabolomics research. In a full program of 7 international experts in their respective fields (each 45 mins) interposed by flash presentations by local scientists (10 mins) you will be exposed to the very latest developments in the field. The full program will be published in September but expect presentations on e.g. Metabolomics and plant breeding; Metabolomics and food quality; New technologies and approaches; Metabolomics data mining; Metabolomics and plant ecology; Metabolomics and health etc. This Symposium is open to everyone but is specifically targeted to young scientists in both industry and academia who have an interest or are active in the field of exploiting metabolomics to advance our molecular knowledge of plants and plant-based materials. If you are interested in joining this free symposium, please mark this date already in your calendar!

Dutch Butterfly Conservation (De Vlinderstichting(Butterfly Organisation) will host its 5th international symposium on Future of Butterflies in Europe – and this includes moths, of course. We invite you to join us in Wageningen, the Netherlands, 2-4 April 2020.

The 4th International Conference on Global Food Security addresses the topic of food security at all spatial levels from local to global, and from an interdisciplinary and systemic food systems perspective. It aims to better understand environmental, nutritional, agricultural, demographic, socio-economic, political, technological and institutional drivers, costs and outcomes of current and future food security. Interactions with contextual factors including climate change, urbanisation, greening the economy and data-driven technologies will be central.