Plant Growth and Soil Nitrogen Modelling

Ecosytems in GLOWA-Danube  

Project Staff:

Prof. Dr. Karl Schneider (Project Leader, Plant Growth Modelling)

Dr. Tim Reichenau (Modelling, Project Coordination)

Dr. Victoria Lenz-Wiedemann (Plant Growth Modelling)

Dr. Christian Klar (Soil Nitorgen Modelling)

Dipl. Geogr. Marius Schmidt (Model Validation, Flux Measurements)

Dr. Peter Fiener

GLOWA-Danube:

Water affects all economic, cultural, social and ecological aspects of daily life and forms the basis for functioning substance cycles and hence for a clean and stable environment. No scientific discipline, with its inevitably unilateral view of the world, is on its own capable to understand the complex interactions between nature, water and humans. It is thus not able to develop methods for a sustainable water resource management under changing boundary conditions. To overcome this, a group of researchers consisting of hydrologists, water resources engineers, meteorologists, glaciologists, geographers, ecologists, environmental economists, environmental psychologists and computer scientists has gathered within the framework of GLOWA-Danube.

Common research in GLOWA-Danube aims at the development and utilization of the integrated decision support system DANUBIA to investigate ways of sustainable future water use. It will integrate the large expertise of the involved partners to build a platform to commonly solve practical future problems..

Modelling Agroecosystems within GLOWA-Danube
The aim of the sectoral project 'Agroecosystems' is to implement plant growth of several crops (weath, barley, maize, sugar beet, potato and grassland) and soil nitrogen dynamic in the decision support system DANUBIA. Plant growth and nitrogen dynamic is modelled physically based in close interrelationship with other sub-modells within DANUBIA. Therefore, the sectoral project Agroecosystems is a major link between other sectoral projects, e.g. Natural Ecosystems (Bayreuth), Agroeconomy (Stuttgart), Hydrology (München) und Meteorology (München, Mainz).

Funding: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF)