Lysanne Snijders PhD » Team

Lysanne is a behavioral ecologist, experienced in the study of personality and social behaviour of wild animals. She is keen to explore how insights from animal behavior can meaningfully inform wildlife conservation.

Her passion for nature led her into her profession as behavioral ecologist and fuels her desire to protect it. Through her work she has realized that nature is not only something we should want to protect but also we should need to protect. She believes humans are part of nature and that we are all connected and impacted by each other. Finding a sustainable and ethically-defensible balance in our relation with non-human nature is one of the biggest challenges we face.

Her studies with wild fish, mammals and birds add to the enormous pile of evidence that individuals in wild animal populations are not just replicates and machines driven by mere instinct, but that they are individual entities with their own experiences, desires and emotions. How we can or should integrate this knowledge in nature conservation is still an open question for her.

Lysanne is an Assistant Professor at the Animal Sciences Department of Wageningen University. She started her academic journey with a PhD at the same university, in collaboration with the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO), studying the role of personality in the social lives of wild songbirds.

Before returning to Wageningen, she completed two postdocs in Berlin, one studying how social behaviour helps individual wild fish find more food (IGB-Berlin) and another studying individual differences in the exploratory behaviour of wild bats and its potential relation to their migratory behaviour (IZW-Berlin). Since her PhD, Lysanne has also been involved in an international network of behavioral ecologists conducting evidence syntheses on the effectiveness of a variety of behavior-based (non-lethal) conservation interventions.