His Royal Highness the Prince of Orange present at the NIOZ and CEME merger ceremony

06-03-2012   His Royal Highness the Prince of Orange will be present at the ceremony celebrating the merger of the Centre for Estuarine and Marine Ecology (CEME) in Yerseke in the province of Zeeland and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) on the island of Texel. These two research institutes merged under the name NIOZ on 1 January 2012.

The two most important Dutch research institutes for fundamental coastal and sea research have joined forces to consolidate the position of the Netherlands in these fields.

The nature of the research projects carried out at the two institutes will remain unchanged for now. The new NIOZ division in Yerseke (formerly CEME) studies life in coastal seas and estuaries. Research at NIOZ on Texel focuses not just on the Wadden and North Seas but also on oceans and the deep sea. The Yerseke division works mainly on ecology; the Texel division also studies the physics, chemistry and geology of seas and oceans. ‘So, the institutes' research interests are supplementary and the merger has created one Dutch institute for fundamental marine research’, says Henk Brinkhuis, Director of NIOZ.

NIOZ on Texel and CEME in Yerseke have been working together closely for years. Their collaboration has now led to a complete merger between the two institutes. CEME used to be part of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO), which was itself part of KNAW, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. NIOZ is an institute that is part of NWO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.

NIOO will continue to conduct research into the ecology in fresh water and on land at their division in Wageningen.