Project
Modelling resilience of agro-ecosystems
Understanding how natural resources co-evolve with management practices is fundamental to all questions concerning their sustainable management. In the search for new pathways of sustainable development we seek to understand how comparable initial conditions in agro-ecosystems lead to fundamentally different resource conditions. The resilience lens provides us with an integrative concept for exploring the dynamics of agro-ecosystems.
The resilience approach emphasizes non-linear dynamics, thresholds, uncertainty and surprise, how periods of gradual change interplay with periods of rapid change and how such dynamics interact across scales, The management of such systems is highly complex and a too strong focus on one component or domain are likely to miss the possibility for interactions among threshold dynamics and the likelihood that a new, resilient, and possibly less desirable system will emerge. These thresholds are governed by a number of different controlling, slow variables that operate at different spatial and temporal scales and in different domains.
Within this research we seek methods and concepts to better integrate and model the interaction between (long-term) bio-physical processes and (short-term) management. The project is embedded in research of the Plant Production Group and the Land Dynamics Group to make sure concepts are backed-up by data.
Dazzled by the concepts and buzzwords but interested? You are more than welcome to come to come and discuss with me, just send an email.
