Kort præsentation

Research areas

My major interest is organisms; plants, animals as well as microorganisms, and how they affect the function of ecosystems. In my opinion, biology without considering the multitude of organisms makes no sense. Traditionally, many ecologists have focused either on organisms (population-ecology, community-ecology) or on system-functioning (system-ecology), and it is a huge challenge to bridge this gap. It may appear simple; however a thorough understanding of the relationship between ecosystem diversity and function remains one of the major unsolved questions in biology.

For very obvious reasons soil is an essential component in terrestrial ecosystems, and here, diversity is a special challenge because one single teaspoon of soil will normally contain more than 10,000 different species most of which are unknown to science. We try to face this challenge in different ways.

• We study how plants and microorganisms interact, and how this affects plant growth. 
• We investigate trophic interactions and food web structures in soil. 
• We analyse DNA and RNA of whole communities.
• Occasionally, we describe new species when we meet forms new to science.
  

I am leader of the Plant Microbiome Lab. Here you can see our current activities:

Plant Microbiome Lab: https://www1.bio.ku.dk/english/research/te/plant_microbiome/

We are very interested in MSc-students for all these subjects.