I am a Vienna-born ecologist with working experience in Austria, Germany, Mexico and the Netherlands. Originally, I was a trained soil ecologist and did research on soil microarthropods, for example their interactions with soil microflora, their repsonse to elevated atmospheric CO2 concentration or the relationship between local and regional species richness. I never restricted my work to soil biota, however, and also investigated the effects of endofauna on reed growth, the diversity patterns of microarthropods in forest canopies and the effects of elevated [CO2] on gall-forming insects and leaf-miners, among others. Since the late 90ies I broadened my expertise concerning ecological data analysis (“getting more out of the data“) by applying methods loaned from artificial intelligence research, for example artificial neural networks, random forests or fuzzy logic. The resulting co-operations with zoologists from various fields (herpetologists, ornithologists, mammalogists,...) led to my veering away from soil biology and to getting more and more involved in vertebrate research. During the last few years I have been working in Dutch ornithological research and consultancy institutions, first at the Vogeltrekstation – Dutch Centre for Bird Migration and Demography and now at Sovon Dutch Centre for Field Ornithology. Currently, I dedicate most of my time to improving my R programming skills in order to automatize analysis of large-scale bird data in the Netherlands.