Primary producers constitute the lion’s share of our food web, and millennia of farming have accrued considerable knowledge about how to maximize yield in crops. Some enigmas however persist. Whether or not plants grow weaker with age deserves attention, because current agricultural practices favor annual crops over perennial crops and bring with it large scale soil erosion and land degradation. According to Reuters, a senior official at the Food and Agricultural Organization recently estimated an average 55 years of harvest before all agricultural lands are depleted worldwide. If more crops could be bred to live and produce food for several years instead of one, we would mitigate a plethora of current negative downward spirals. By asking the right questions, we can stabilize our agroecological systems in the long-term. 

My PhD is part of the Sapere Aude Danish Council for Independent Research project “SEAD – Stage-, Environment-, and Age-based Demography of Plants.” In plant demography, we know that size matters – but what about age? I aim to map survival probabilities in plants by following individuals as their age progresses, using the study systems Plantago lanceolata (Lancet Vejbred), Capsicum annuum (Chili), some important fodder species including Lotus corniculatus (Almindelig Kællingetand), Trifolium pratense (Rød Klover) and Lupinus polyphyllus (Mangebladet Lupin). I hope to inform conservation assessments and efforts in trait selection for longer-lived crop species.

I am passionate about species conservation, the protection of crop wild relatives and rare landraces which hold the potential of a diverse agriculture on our changing planet.