Thijs van der Plas

Thijs van der Plas is a postdoctoral researcher at Wageningen University & Research, specializing in the intersection of artificial intelligence and environmental science. His work focuses on leveraging satellite imagery for ecological monitoring, particularly biodiversity assessment in the United Kingdom.

• Affiliation: Wageningen University & Research
• Research Focus: AI-driven environmental monitoring, satellite image analysis, biodiversity conservation

Van der Plas has developed the S2BMS dataset, which combines Sentinel-2 satellite imagery with butterfly occurrence data to advance remote sensing applications in ecology. His research involves innovative machine learning techniques, such as soft contrastive regularization, to improve species prediction models.

Current projects include LTER-LIFE, an interdisciplinary initiative exploring long-term ecological monitoring using AI. He collaborates with institutions like Google Earth Engine and contributes code repositories for data analysis.