Theunis Piersma
Theunis Piersma is Emeritus Professor in Global Flyway Ecology at the University of Groningen, research associate of BirdEyes-Centre for Global Ecological Change in Leeuwarden, and a senior scientist at NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research on Texel. His worldwide research centred on the demography of 15 migratory bird populations (including black-tailed godwits and spoonbills in the Netherlands). This work forms the basis for investigations on population processes, distributional ecology, developmental biology, social systems, migration and animal cultures. In 2014, he won the Spinoza Prize of NWO and in 2020 the Godman-Salvin medal of the British Ornithologists' Union. In addition to more than 700 scientific articles, he has published some 20 books, including 'Sinagote. The biography of a spoonbill’ (published by Lynx Edicions, Barcelona, in English, French and Spanish, 2022). With multi-instrumentalist Sytze Pruiksma, he created and performed “TRACKS”, a musical performance for Oerol 2017 about migratory birds in the Wadden Sea. For the past six years, he and his team have been working on establishing BirdEyes-Centre for Global Ecological Change in Leeuwarden, a new interdisciplinary and interfaculty branch of the University of Groningen (birdeyes.org).
