The Nature Conservation and Plant Ecology Group (NCP) performs research and education in the fields of nature conservation, systems ecology and plant population biology, focusing on the interactions between vegetation characteristics and ecosystem dynamics in temperate and boreal regions of the northern hemisphere. The NCP group is part of the Centre for Ecosystem Studies, in which groups of Wageningen University and teams of the Alterra research institute cooperate.
The main research fields are biodiversity-ecosystem functioning, the carbon and nutrient economy of ecosystems, community dynamics and vegetation science, plant competition and coexistence mechanisms, plant-herbivore interactions and plant population dynamics. Within many of these fields we also consider the potential impact of climate change. The potential feedbacks between climate-induced shifts in vegetation composition and the regional climate are the focus of an exciting new field of research within our group. The research approaches include manipulative experiments in the field, common gardens and the greenhouse, modeling, and field observations. Both fundamental and applied studies are carried out in temperate and boreal ecosystem like grasslands, forests and bogs. The results on the impacts of global climate change and eutrophication are widely applied in nature conservation. |
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