One Crop Health: Next generation crop protection

The One Crop Health project integrates the latest advances in agri-tech, biotechnology, ecology, and data sciences to reduce reliance on pesticides in agroecosystems. Drawing on the One Health concept in human health, our international research program integrates crop health, soil health and agroecosystem health to design mote sustainable crop protection systems.

Our systems-based approach emphasises ‘bottom-up’ agroecological approaches for prevention of large, frequent pest outbreaks; digital solutions for more timely and precise detection and prediction of pest populations; and next-generation, biology-inspired solutions for effective and environmentally benign control.

 

 

We believe human health systems with their greater emphasis on public health approaches to prevent disease, surveillance and diagnostics to enable early detection, and evidence-based, personalised interventions, can provide motivating examples for future crop health systems. Our One Crop Health concept uses data-driven approaches to embrace the inherent complexities that dictate the interactions between crop plants, pests, functional biodiversity and their environmental and management drivers in agroecosystems. The hierarchical, multi-scale approach that we propose will establish:

  1. Farm networks in Denmark and UK for studying field to landscape population dynamics and epidemiology of crop pests, weeds, diseases and functional biodiversity (WP1).

  2. Large-scale manipulative field experiments to design, test and optimise future crop health and protection systems (WP2).

  3. Systems models and digital twins to simulate current and future agroecological approaches for one crop health (WP3).

  4. An international PhD school focused on hypothesis-driven research to develop novel science and new interventions for pest prevention, detection and control (WP4).

 

 

 

Researchers

Name Title Phone E-mail
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Kirkensgaard, Kristine Groth Special Consultant +4535332431 E-mail

Contact

Paul Neve
Project leader
pbneve@plen.ku.dk
+4535322161

Funded by:

Novo Nordisk Foundation Challenge Grant
Period:  01-01-2024 to 31-12-2029