DFG Research Unit 5664

Agroforestry for sustainable multifunctional agriculture

Rationale

FORMULA studies agroforestry systems and their Nature's Contributions to People (NCP). The aim is to identify management options that optimise synergies and mitigate potential trade-offs arising from the incorporation of forestry elements into arable land.

The project will investigate the supply and demand of NCPs of two agroforestry systems at the Gladbacherhof in Hesse and the Ackerbau(m) site in Brandenburg (Germany) with different production systems (organic vs. conventional) and environmental conditions.

The tree rows create in-field spatial gradients of environmental factors and form the basis for addressing two primary research objectives, i.e., to evaluate the performance of silvo-arable agroforestry systems and compare them with reference treeless farming systems; and to advance the mechanistic understanding of the processes underlying spatial patterns of regulating and material NCPs.

FORMULA is a joint research initiative of JLU Giessen and the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), in cooperation with the Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE).

Agroforestry system in Großmutz, Brandenburg (Foto: Lutz Breuer)

Gladbacherhof agroforestry trial, Hesse (Foto JLU/Till Schürmann)

Project Structure

FORMULA is structured in five subprojects and a coordinating project, investigating NCP indicators related to climate, freshwater supply, soil quality, biodiversity, habitat, and food and feed production. In addition to the individual research in the sub-projects, FORMULA includes three central experiments in which the sub-projects work closely together, such as transect sampling perpendicular to the tree line, a ¹⁵N-labelling trial on the competition of nitrogen between trees and plants, and high-resolution spatial data collection using drones and lidar for upscaling NCP indicators.

Open Positions

The project will officially start in October 2024. For now, we are looking for enthusiatic researchers who would like to work in one of the subprojects for four years.

SP1 | Greenhouse gas fluxes and carbon sequestration

PhD in carbon sequestration, to be announced in due time (Andreas Gattinger, JLU)

PhD in trace gas emissions, to be announced in due time (Mathias Hoffmann, ZALF)

SP2 | Water and nutrient fluxes

PhD in water fluxes (Lutz Breuer, JLU; Maren Dubbert, ZALF)

PhD in nutrient fluxes (Jan Siemens, JLU)

SP3 | Biodiversity

PhD in macroorganisms/microarthropods, to be announced in due time (Miklós Bálint, JLU)

PhD in microorganisms, to be announced in due time (Stefanie P. Glaeser, JLU)

SP4 | Mapping Plant Functional Variation (MapFun)

PhD in mapping plant functional traits (Till Kleinebecker, JLU)

PhD in plant functional traits (Joana Bergmann, ZALF)