dr. FJ (Franca) Bongers

My general interest is to understand how, why and when interactions among species can contribute towards ecosystem functioning. I do this from the perspective of the plant, where I explore the responses that underlie plant interactions with their environment, and consequently quantify how these plant responses influence growth and ecosystem functioning. I combine experimental work, field measurements and modeling to scale from organ traits to plant responses and community performance.

My long term endeavor is to translate our scientific knowledge on agroecological processes in species diverse systems towards designing diverse cropping systems that farmers actually can adopt and can support food security in a sustainable way.

Besides working on diverse cropping systems I love to work within a diverse environment. I am a team player and love to engage many people within my research, specifically with a variety of skills, personalities and cultures because I believe that the functioning of any system benefits from diversity!

Diverse agroecosystems

I apply my ecological knowledge on the role of traits for species interactions and their potential effects on ecosystem functioning towards divers agroecosystems, think about strip intercropping. Combining different crop species within the same field has the potential to improve sustainability and resilience of the agricultural industry. However, we need more knowledge and understanding of the underlying mechanisms of species interactions that occur in diverse agro-ecosystems and drive performance. My main focus is identifying structural and physiological characteristics that influence plant-plant interactions between neighboring (crop) species and quantify their effect for crop performance and field functioning.

Within the CropMix project (Cropmix.com) I work collectively with researchers from soil and root ecology, entomology and farming systems ecology to quantify the mechanisms that underly crop combinations within a realistic farmers management. We work together to collect structural and physiological traits and plant responses in greenhouse and field experiments, and create functional-structural plant models to scale from plant traits and responses to crop performance. 

Mixed-species forests

From 2017 to 2022 I worked at the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences within the BEF-China project (BEF-china.com). During these years I determined the effects of organ-level functional traits on tree and forest productivity within experimental species-diverse forest plots. We showed among others that differences in species functional traits become more important and reliable with time in predicting forest productivity, which is valuable for restoration projects. The overall main idea is that more diverse forests will perform better over time due to the diversity in traits and trait values, responses of species to neighbor species and to the local environment.