“For my MSc thesis I chose a subject that matters a lot to me because it is happening in my backyard: agricultural intensification of grassland use which causes loss of biodiversity and specifically meadow bird decline.”, Marijke Bekkema, UNIGIS Amsterdam.
Marijke Bekkema, UNIGIS Amsterdam alumni has been awarded the third place within the Academic Excellence Prize 2017. This annual Prize is awarded by UNIGIS International Association to students having submitted the best MSc theses during the previous academic year, accepted for graduation at one of the UNIGIS partner universities worldwide.
In her thesis Marijke presented an elaborated methodology of using the Sentinel-2 satellite data to map land use intensity of grasslands in the Netherlands, and showed how it influences meadow bird populations.
Marijke, who is living in a small village in Friesland, the north of the Netherlands, obtained a MSc in Veterinary Medicine in 2002 and until the fall of 2010 happily worked as a veterinarian surgeon for small animals. Thanks to many long bicycle tours and hikes through remote areas of Europe and New-Zealand, she became more and more interested in Geology and Archaeology. So, in 2010 she made a radical decision, quit her job and went back to university. In 2013 she got her BSc in Earth Sciences, specialized in Geoarchaeology. During that time she first learned about GIS and was fascinated by the combination of maps and computer and so she continued her studies, completing the UNIGIS MSc, and specialized in Remote Sensing. Currently she is working as a tutor for the UNIGIS Amsterdam module Remote Sensing & GIS.