MAVA Doñana fellowship for Dr. Vansteelant

On 1 April 2022, Dr. Wouter Vansteelant started a three year MAVA-Doñana-Spoonbill fellowship at the Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences (GELIFES). He will work together with Prof. Theunis Piersma, holder of the Rudi Drent Chair in Global Flyway Ecology. Vansteelant will assess how the protected yet threatened wetlands of Doñana, the delta of the Guidalquivir near Seville in Spain, are linked to the rest of the world by way of the migrations of spoonbills and black-tailed godwits. Those two species are intensely studied at the University of Groningen, NIOZ and the University of Amsterdam for a long time already.

Tracked spoonbills and godwits will inform us about the change in use of the various parts of the Doñana by such water birds, now that this World Heritage site is drying up. The drying up doesn’t happen because of climate change, but from the overuse of groundwater by an intensive agricultural industry.