Projects

Invasive species don’t wait for funding cycles. When two Horizon Europe research consortia — GuardIAS and OneStop — needed an early alert system to notify researchers and land managers of new species occurrences, they didn’t want to start from scratch. They wanted to build on something that already worked.

That something was GBIF Alert, an open-source alert engine I had developed and which had already proven itself in the field. The consortia brought me in as a development partner specifically to extend and adapt it for their needs — a decision that speaks for itself: good open-source software gets reused.

My role covers the full development cycle: architecture decisions, feature development, and active participation in consortium meetings alongside universities, research institutes and conservation organisations from across Europe.

Climate data about Belgium exists in abundance — scattered across institutions, formats and websites, with no single place to find it all. The Belgian Climate Center set out to change that: a central, authoritative portal where anyone could discover climate data about Belgium, regardless of where it originally lived.

They came to me via a referral from the Belgian Biodiversity Platform, for whom I had built a similar portal. Rather than jumping straight to implementation, we started with an advisory phase: mapping their needs, defining the right technical approach, and building a shared plan before a single line of code was written. That groundwork made the implementation phase faster, smoother, and far less likely to produce surprises.

The result is a standards-compliant open data portal built on CKAN — with a custom theme, custom extensions, and full alignment with DCAT-AP, the European standard for data portal interoperability.

Brussels is a small region with a surprisingly rich biodiversity — but for years, the data underpinning its management was fragmented, inconsistently structured, and hard to use. Brussels Environment wanted to change that: a solid, maintainable biodiversity database built on modern standards, with the GBIF taxonomic backbone at its core.

I originally came to this project through a previous employer. When that engagement ended, Brussels Environment asked me to continue independently — and several years on, I still do.

The work involved restructuring the existing data model, integrating the GBIF taxonomic backbone for consistent species referencing, and setting up the processes and tooling needed to keep the database accurate and useful over time.

Every year, billions of birds migrate across Europe — mostly at night, mostly invisible. Aeroecology, the study of life in the atmospheric boundary layer, has found an unlikely ally in weather radar: the same networks used to track rain and storms can detect mass bird movements with remarkable precision. The data exists. Making it meaningful to researchers and observers is a different challenge.

CROW is a visualisation tool that turns raw radar data into clear, interactive representations of bird migration in real time. I designed and built the frontend, bringing together Vue.js and D3.js to make complex movement data explorable and interpretable.

I originally developed CROW as an employee. I continue to maintain it independently, and expect to contribute further to it in the future.