Young Talent Graduation Prize for Loes Verkuil

Loes Verkuil (Sustainable Development) has won a Young Talent Graduation Prize in the category of Biology. From November 2018 to October 2019, she participated in a scientific research internship at the Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development. She won the award in recognition of the high quality of her research report, the excellence of her work methods and the innovative insights that arose from the research. She will be presented with the prize by the Royal Netherlands Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW) at 14:00 on Monday, 29 November. The award includes a cash prize of € 3,000. Congratulations Loes!

The presentation will be broadcast live via the button “Livestream Prijsuitreikingen 29 November 2021” at www.khmw.nl. The winners of the graduation prizes will all be present in a Zoom session. They will be honoured by the sponsors of the prizes, who will also be participating via Zoom. This will be followed by short videos submitted by each of the prize winners. Loes Verkuil will receive her award during session 1, which is scheduled from 14:00 to 15:00.

Landscape restoration

Under supervision of Dr. Pita Verweij and Dr. Vincent de Leijster Loes Verkuil conducted research into landscape restoration in a tropical agricultural system. The study focused specifically on reducing the environmental burden of coffee farming and improving the ecosystem’s resilience in one of the world’s oldest and most important coffee regions: the Eje Cafeterio in Colombia. Loes observed the effects of planting trees in the coffee plantations (agroforestry) on soil recovery, carbon storage and coffee plant productivity.

Shade coffee

Her research showed that major ecological improvements occurred in the first 10 years of the study, while coffee productivity was not significantly reduced. The shade trees also generated extra income from products such as fruit, nuts and wood. These results indicate that restoring coffee landscapes and sustainable production methods are possible without reductions in crop yields, which is an important economic argument in favour of the production of ‘shade coffee’.