Search

Movebank is a leading global platform for animal tracking and other animal-borne (a.k.a. bio-logging) sensor data (Kays et al., 2022). It is used by over 3,500 data owners to collect, manage, share, and archive >4 billion location records describing movements of 1,252 taxa in over 7,500 user-managed studies. While Movebank is well known within movement ecology and wildlife management circles, it remains less recognized as a source of general purpose occurrence data. Like most other remotely-sensed animal occurrence data, data from Movebank are not discoverable or accessible through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). This lack of integration across platforms limits the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration, and for the use of remotely-sensed species occurrence data in conservation assessments and other products that rely on GBIF. The goal of this project was to develop an open-source workflow to make animal GPS tracking data on Movebank accessible to the GBIF community. This workflow consists of best practices and software to allow semi-automated publication of Movebank data to GBIF. We developed, refined and demonstrated this workflow by publishing a set of datasets from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) and the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO) that represent similar and relatively straightforward methodology and quality (avian GPS tracking). In this project, we aimed to complete three work packages: Publish five NIOO-KNAW bird GPS tracking studies as open data on Movebank. Create best practices and software to publish Movebank animal GPS tracking data to GBIF. Publish 11 bird GPS tracking datasets from Movebank to GBIF. We published data from five Oystercatcher GPS studies in the Netherlands as open data on Movebank and Zenodo. These datasets collectively contain 6 million GPS positions and 164 million acceleration measurements and are formatted as Frictionless Data Packages (Walsch and Pollock, 2017) to facilitate understanding and access. The datasets are described in an open-access data paper published in ZooKeys (van der Kolk et al., 2022). We developed a new open-source R package "movepub" (Desmet, 2022), that automates the transformation of Movebank data to Darwin Core and metadata to Ecological Metadata Language (EML). Members of the Darwin Core Maintenance Group and Machine Observation Interest Group at TDWG reviewed the suggested transformation to Darwin Core. We created and published best practices to aid Movebank users in publishing their animal GPS tracking data to GBIF and published these on the Movebank website. We then used the R package to transform 15 datasets to Darwin Core Archives and published these via an Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) to GBIF. We also registered the marine datasets with the Ocean Biodiversity Information Facility (OBIS). Overall, we reached or surpassed the goals of this project. The developed workflow proved successful and is already used to support other mobilization efforts. The resulting datasets, software and data paper all acknowledge NLBIF for its support and are publicly accessible., This project was realized with a financial contribution from Stichting NLBIF - Netherlands Biodiversity Information Facility. NLBIF supports Dutch organizations and researchers in putting biodiversity data online via gbif.org in an open and internationally standardized manner., {"references":["Desmet P. 2022. movepub: Prepare Movebank Data for Publication. R package version 0.1.0. https://github.com/inbo/movepub","Kays R, Davidson SC, Berger M, Bohrer G, Fiedler W, Flack A, Hirt J, Hahn C, Gauggel D, Russell B, et al. 2022. The Movebank system for studying global animal movement and demography. Methods Ecol Evol. 13(2):419–431. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13767","van der Kolk H, Desmet P, Oosterbeek K, Allen AM, Baptist MJ, Bom RA, Davidson SC, de Jong J, de Kroon H, Dijkstra B, et al. 2022. GPS tracking data of Eurasian oystercatchers (Haematopus ostralegus) from the Netherlands and Belgium. ZooKeys. 1123:31–45. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1123.90623","Walsch and Pollock. 2017. Data Package. Version 1. https://specs.frictionlessdata.io/data-package/"]}

Populisme kan onder andere worden gezien als een negatieve houding van kiezers ten aanzien van de nationale politieke elite. Deze negatieve houding is in meer of mindere mate aanwezig bij alle burgers. Het heeft dus geen zin onderscheid te maken tussen populisten en de rest van de bevolking. Populisme hangt vooral sterk samen met opleiding en veel minder met geslacht en leeftijd. Verder hangt populisme sterk samen met negatieve opvattingen over Europese samenwerking en immigratie, een roep om kleinere inkomensverschillen en met ontevredenheid over de Nederlandse democratie. Populistische sentimenten leven sterker onder niet-stemmers en aanhangers van de PVV, SP, 50PLUS, DENK en FvD dan onder aanhangers van andere partijen.

A description and illustrations of both macroscopic and microscopic characters of Lamprospora verrucispora sp. nov. are provided. Differences from other bryophilous Pezizales with globose ascospores ornamented with isolated warts are discussed and a dichotomous key to these species is given. Gall formation on rhizoids and chloronema of the bryophyte host Campylopus pyriformis is described and illustrated. This represents the first report of gall formation for a species of the genus Lamprospora

In dit hoofdstuk laten we zien: • Over de taken die het gemeentebestuur zou moeten uitvoeren bestaan sterke meningsverschillen. Vooral over de opvang van asielzoekers zijn de meningsverschillen groot. • Van een samenhang tussen verschillende beleidsopvattingen is geen sprake. Opvattingen over de kant die het gemeentebestuur op zou moeten gaan, zijn niet terug te brengen tot een of twee algemene conflictdimensies. • Het verschil in beleidsopvattingen hangt vooral sterk samen met opleiding. Daarnaast zijn de opvattingen over onder meer cameratoezicht en subsidies voor kunst en cultuur vooral anders in grotere steden. • Vooral lager opgeleiden zijn van mening dat zij geen rol kunnen spelen in het lokale bestuur. • Tijdens lokale verkiezingen komen niet alle groepen in gelijke mate naar de stembus. Ook spelen niet alle opvattingen daarbij in gelijke mate een rol.

Solving complex societal problems demands wide societal support for policies to be legitimate. The societal support can be delivered by political parties, but given the strong divide between parties about many topics, and given the dwindling societal embedding of those parties (declining party memberships), there is a need for additional ways to retain societal support. Moreover, in response to the growing awareness that many of these societal problems (e.g., climate change mitigation; the Dutch nitrogen crisis) cannot be solved by the state on its own, calls for a more inclusive participatory society and more democratic renewal are becoming louder from various groups in society (see e.g., Tweede Kamer, 2020; “Betrokken bij Klimaat,’’ 2021). In doing so, the importance of involving the interests and wishes of citizens in political decision-making is increasingly highlighted. At the same time, the last decade has seen a growing interest worldwide in deliberative mini-publics, such as citizens’ juries, consensus conferences, deliberative polls, and the Belgian and Dutch G1000 initiatives. Some see in these innovative practices a way to increase citizens’ involvement in political decision-making and thereby make contemporary representative democratic institutions more inclusive of citizens’ wishes and interests. But despite the growing interest in these deliberative practices, knowledge about the functioning of different mini-publics, in general, is still in its infancy. Therefore, this dissertation aims to learn more about the functioning of deliberative mini-publics by examining the following central research question: To what extent can deliberative mini-publics contribute to the greater involvement of citizens in local decision making? To answer this research question, we focus in this dissertation on a certain ‘new’ type of deliberative mini-public that has become quite popular in the Netherlands in recent years: the Dutch G1000 initiatives. To gain a better understanding of how the G1000 functions, we used a longitudinal case study design and a mixed-methods approach that combines qualitative and quantitative data. By following three G1000 initiatives in the Dutch province of Overijssel over three years (period 2017 - 2020), we systematically analyse and compare the effects of the G1000 initiatives on citizen participation in local government.

Referendums on European integration play a prominent role in the decision-making processes in current European democracies. Between 1972 and 2016, 61 EU-related referendums took place across 28 countries. In his dissertation, Joost van den Akker (1984) investigates under which conditions governments win such EU-related referendums. The fact that the government won in 46 cases demonstrates that overall governments have been quite successful in securing popular support for their EU policies. The study locates the EU-related referendum in the historical perspective of referendums in Europe after the French revolution. It develops a model to explain the current potential and practice of EU-related referendums in European democracies. The most prominent contribution lies in explaining the referendum result by politicalinstitutional and socio-economic conditions at the aggregate level. It is argued that a unifi ed majority government and economic development are the main drivers for winning referendums. If the economy is deteriorating, however, the government only wins if it is only recently in offi ce and backed by a wide consensus among elites. The dissertation explains why EU-related referendums are held, under which conditions governments win or lose them, and how governments cope with inconvenient outcomes. In this way, it contributes to the strategies which governments can deploy to win a referendum, or to deal best with a referendum defeat.

This thesis set out to answer the research question How do Commissioners’ characteristics influence their behaviour and consequently the EU’s legislative process? Given the Commission’s central position in the EU’s system of governance as legislative agenda-setter, improving our understanding of individual Commissioners is very relevant. It was argued that the responsible Commissioner enjoys ministerial discretion (within limits) and that consequently the preferences of individual Commissioners matter. It was expected that a Commissioner’s nationality and membership in a political party are characteristics that have a decisive impact on how a Commissioner fulfils her tasks once in office. The first part of the research question about the consequences of Commissioner characteristics for their behaviour was evaluated using the speeches as a directly observable behaviour. The text analysis method Wordfish was used to extract the positions Commissioners took in the individual speeches that were part of 62 Commissioner – Topics. The positions were traced over time to test whether a change in the Commissioner’s home country leads to a change of positioning. This was not the case. Instead, Commissioners changed positions they took in speeches on topics in which policy developments were observed. Likewise, in seven out of nine Commissioner –Topics expected to be affected by the financial crisis, the positions taken before the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy were indeed different from those taken afterwards. For the second part of the research question about the impact on the legislative process, a more indirect measure was used. In this case, the voting records of the other legislative institutions – the Council and the EP, respectively – were analysed. The analyses conducted in this thesis suggest that neither nationality nor party membership have a decisive impact on Commissioner behaviour in terms of speech-making. Still, these characteristics seem to impact inter-institutional relations in the EU’s legislative process. In their relation with the Council, a Commissioner’s nationality takes precedence over her partisanship. In their relation with the EP, national party competition seems to be continued. To answer the research question, nationality and party membership – two central characteristics of Commissioners as European politicians – do not seem to solely determine Commissioners’ behaviour.