dr. JC (Jacco) van Rijssel

As an evolutionary ecologist I am interested in how anthropogenic perturbations influence the environment and thereby the evolutionary ecology of vertebrates, fish in particular. During my PhD at Leiden University, I tried to resolve if and how Lake Victoria cichlids have adapted to the severe environmental changes in the past 40 years using the Naturalis Biodiversity Center cichlid collection. During my Postdoc in the Seehausen lab at EAWAG/Bern University, I attempted to explain why some cichlid genera radiate into many different species where other genera failed to do so. 

In my current position as quanitative ecologist at Wageningen Marine Research, I am mainly working on determining the status of the Dutch freshwater fish stocks by analyzing the trend of individual species through time. I am also very interested in the behaviour of migratory fish species and how biotic (e.g. predation) and abiotic (e.g. river discharge) factors influence the behaviour and the population as a whole. I recently got closely involved in creating the so-called genetic fish atlas which we like to use to map the whole genome of all Dutch (freshwater) fish species in order to solve several biodiversity issues.