My projects

We are involved in several projects, with a lot a great collaborators.

DROOGHT, Improving cereal yield predictions under drought. Root diameter as a predictor of plant water uptake across scales

As droughts are becoming more frequent and severe, there is a call for adaptation strategies that enhance the crop’s resilience to these climate conditions. One pathway to do so is to select crops whose root system optimize the soil water uptake. However, the identification of adequate ideotypes is compromised by the limited understanding of the structural drivers controlling the water uptake from the root to crop scales. This knowledge gap is attributable to the multiscale and nonlinear nature of the soil-plant interactions. DROOGHT aims to address these gaps by identifying the dominant drivers of the complex below-ground processes in cereal crops.

DROOGHT is financed by the European Research Concil under the Consolidator Grant scheme.



DETECT, Regional Climate Change. Disentangling the Role of Land Use and Water Management

While several continental regions on Earth are getting wetter, others are drying out not only in terms of precipitation but also measured by the increase or decrease in surface water, water stored in the soils, the plant root zone, and in groundwater. Observations, however, do not support a simple dry-gets-dryer and wet-gets-wetter logic and existing climate models fail to explain observed patterns of hydrological change sufficiently. This CRC aims to close this gap in understanding. To better comprehend the origin of these patterns, it is necessary to build a modelling framework that explains past observations as realistically as possible, accounts for potential drivers of change that may have been understudied in the past, and can predict future changes.



CROP, Combining ROot contrasted Phenotypes for more resilient agro ecosystem

The CROP project aims at estimating the beneficial impact of combining contrasted root phenotypes within a single field. We will evaluate the benefit of the combination of water, carbon and nitrogen flow, microbial communities, and yield. To achieve this goal, we will use a set of complementary experimental and modelling tools.



PHENOROB. Robotics and Phenotyping for Sustainable Crop Production

Food, feed, fiber, and fuel: Crop farming plays an essential role for the future of humanity and our planet. The environmental footprint of agriculture needs to be reduced: less input of chemicals like herbicides and fertilizer and other limited resources like water or energy. Simultaneously, the decline in arable land and climate change pose additional constraints like drought, heat, and other extreme weather events. Achieving sustainable crop production with limited resources is a task of immense proportions. In order to achieve this, the University of Bonn together with Forschungszentrum Jülich conducts research in the Cluster of Excellence “PhenoRob – Robotics and Phenotyping for Sustainable Crop Production” to develop methods and new technologies that observe, analyze, better understand and specifically treat plants. Our research focuses on improving the fundamental understanding of all relevant parameters like plant growth, soil, biodiversity, or atmosphere. PhenoRob, the only Cluster of Excellence in agriculture in Germany, aims at addressing these issues: Change crop production by optimizing breeding and farming management using new technologies.



Some random projects I did and maintain just for fun...

Topless Ninja

Website referencing fun plant gene names. Yes Plant biologists can be funny sometimes.



Conference Bingo

Shiny app to create bingo tables for scientific conferences (plant science theme and others)



Science podcast finder

Shiny app to find science podcast. Based on this article: Science podcasts: analysis of global production and output from 2004 to 2018, MacKenzie (2018), bioRxiv https://doi.org/10.1101/298356