Nutrients, Food and Environment
Our vision is Sustainable agriculture for soil, water and air. Our ambitions are to:
- Perform research on understanding and modeling carbon, nutrient, and pollutant dynamics within agricultural ecosystems across varying scales.
- Educate BSc, MSc, and PhD students in linking food, water, soil and the environment.
- Collaborate with global research communities on agricultural ecosystem management.
- Inform relevant stakeholders in the agricultural sector (policy, farmer associations, supply chain) on sustainable farming practices and governance approaches.
Our research focuses on better understanding of the complex interactions between food production, soil quality, water availability, carbon and nutrient dynamics, and environmental impacts in response to agricultural management. To achieve this, we combine process-based/empirical modeling with data-driven insights from methods such as meta-analysis and machine learning. Our central research lines are (see figure):
- Food production in response to Nutrient and Water availability
- Interactions between Food Production and Soil health
- Interactions between Food Production and Environment
Our area of interests include: the Netherlands, Europe and China with high intensity agriculture (with priority on reducing environmental impacts while sustaining the food production), Africa (with low intensity agriculture with priority on food production) and global.
