Alterra

About Alterra

Alterra is an institute within the legal entity “Stichting Dienst Landbouwkundig Onderzoek”, and is part of the Wageningen Univeristy and Research Center (WUR). It was established in 2000 and has more than 400 employees working in 11 teams. Alterra offers a combination of practical, innovative and interdisciplinary scientific research across many disciplines related to the green world around us and the sustainable use of our living environment.

From Alterra, the team Environmental Risk Assessment (ERA) is involved in SOLUTIONS: http://www.wageningenur.nl/en/Expertise-Services/Research-Institutes/alterra/About-Alterra/Teams-Alterra/Environmental-Risk-Assessment.htm.

The ERA team is highly experienced in all aspects of behaviour and effects of pesticides and other contaminants in the environment. It coordinates several national research projects and is coordinator or research partner for a number of international projects and programs, among them the EU training networks http://cream-itn.eu/, and http://seatglobal.eu/, and the Cefic-financed projects http://cefic-lri.org/projects/lri-eco19-rug-chimera-an-integrated-modelling-tool-for-ecological-risk-assessment/, and http://cefic-lri.org/projects/eco17-wag-evaluation-of-test-methods-for-measuring-toxicity-to-sediment-organisms/.

Adress

Role in the SOLUTIONS project

• Lead of WP13 “Ecological assessment” Partner in of WP18 “
• Human and ecological risk modelling of pollutant mixtures”

Main scientific contributions

• Ecological assessment
• Taxonomy- and traits based analysis of community composition data
• Ecological modelling
• Chemical uptake and effect modelling

Member portraits

Andreas Focks (Dr.)

Andreas Focks works as researcher at Alterra (www.era.wur.nl), Wageningen University and Research Centre, where he is involved in several national and international projects in the field of modelling chemical effects at individual, population and community levels. In SOLUTIONS, he is responsible for the coordination of WP Ecological assessment and for the Alterra contributions to WP Ecological modelling. His main scientific contribution will consist in analyzing relations between species traits, chemical properties and mechanistic model parameters for describing uptake and effects of chemicals at individual levels. Andreas was working as PostDoc project in the MarieCurie ITN CREAM (www.cream-itn.eu) from 2011-2013.

Paul van den Brink (Prof. Dr.)

Paul J. Van den Brink is a professor of chemical stress ecology and works at the research institute Alterra and the Aquatic Ecology and Water Quality Management Group of Wageningen University, both belonging to the Wageningen University and Research centre. For both affiliations, he is involved in supervising and executing international projects on the scientific underpinning of higher tier risk assessment procedures for contaminants like pesticides, veterinary medicines and personal and home care products. Recent research topics are the development of effect models (e.g. individual based, meta-population models and ecoinformatics, expert base models), Trait based Ecological Risk Assessment (TERA) and ecological risk assessment of chemicals in the tropics. Within Solutions Paul is involved in the tools work package. Paul is/was involved in the following European projects: http://cream-itn.eu/, http://seatglobal.eu/, http://cefic-lri.org/projects/lri-eco19-rug-chimera-an-integrated-modelling-tool-for-ecological-risk-assessment/, http://cefic-lri.org/projects/eco17-wag-evaluation-of-test-methods-for-measuring-toxicity-to-sediment-organisms/ and https://sites.google.com/site/aquastressproject/home.

Hans Baveco (Dr.)

Hans Baveco works as a senior researcher at Alterra (Wageningen University and Research Centre).  He is involved in various projects in which ecological models are developed for risk assessment of contaminants, at population-, community-, food-web- and landscape-levels. Within the SOLUTIONS project Hans is involved in the ecological modeling work package. He will contribute to population-level ERA, developing approaches at different levels of detail: simple life-history models to scan a large number of species for a large number of chemicals at many point-locations, and detailed individual-based models for selected chemicals and selected (vertebrate, fish) species operating over large spatial scales.

Andreu Rico (Dr.)

Andreu Rico works as researcher on ecotoxicology and chemical risk assessment at Alterra (www.era.wur.nl), Wageningen University and Research Centre, The Netherlands. Within SOLUTIONS, he will be involved in the implementation of taxonomy-based and trait-based approaches to the analysis of biological monitoring data, with the intention of exploring correlations between different stressors and biodiversity. His main scientific contribution will be the identification of single and combinations of pollutants that currently shape the biological characteristics of the populations and communities inhabiting our European aquatic ecosystems.