Project

ECO-INTENS-HORT

My Marie Sklodowska-Curie research addresses ecological intensification in horticulture. Specifically, I investigate the extent to which we can increase crop quantity and quality by understanding relationships between functional diversity, ecosystem services and genotype-specific traits.
Biodiversity is a vital resource for humanity, providing essential ecosystem services for food production. Agriculture is a main driver of biodiversity loss, thus jeopardising the biodiversity-based ecosystem functions and services agriculture itself depends upon. The demand for agricultural products is rising, so alternatives to conventional intensification are urgently needed. Ecological intensification strengthens natural processes through regulating and supporting ecosystem services instead of using human produced inputs.
Current research on temperate and tropical crops indicates that many crop systems experience pollination deficits, limiting crop production. Effective pollinators have been identified for some crops, but we lack a mechanistic understanding of how functional biodiversity translates to gene flow across plantations, and thus crop yield and quality. How floral traits of different crop genotypes affect gene flow has also received little to no attention.