Editorial Team

Elke Bloem's research at JKI's Institute for Crop and Soil Science focuses on plant nutrition and in particular on sulphur metabolism in plants and soils. This includes sulphur-containing secondary metabolites and their importance for plant health. The evaluation of recycled and organic fertilisers in terms of their antibiotic contamination and agronomic efficiency are other research areas.

Til Feike heads the “Sustainable Crop Production” working group at JKI's Institute for Strategies and Technology Assessment. He is also responsible for the JKI Coordination Unit "Climate", an interface between research and politics. With his team, he works on the assessment, modelling and improvement of cropping systems and the respective Genotype × Management interactions in a changing environment.

Gunter Backes heads the section Organic Plant Breeding and Agrobiodiversity at the University of Kassel in Witzenhausen. His research focuses on the breeding of wheat & barley, peas, tomatoes, and fruit trees for organic farming ecosystems, resilient against biotic and abiotic stresses. He is also working on the use and preservation of plant genomic resources, using field trials as well as genomic methods in both fields.

Sonoko D. Bellingrath-Kimura is Co-head of Research Area 2 "Land Use and Governance" at the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) and professor on “Land Use Systems” at HU Berlin. With her research group, she analyses and develops innovative cropping systems to improve provisioning of ecosystem services in agricultural landscape.

Andreas Gattinger holds the professorship of Organic Farming at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. His research fields are environmental and soil science with a special focus on carbon cycling, greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.

Timo Kautz is head of the crop science group at the Albrecht Daniel Thaer Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Sciences at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. He searches for sustainable ways of cultivating arable crops and in this instance, investigates fertilizing regimes, plant root architecture and the soil microbiome.

Urs Niggli is an expert in organic farming systems, soil science, environmental impact assessment and sustainable development of agriculture. He was head of the Swiss Forschungsinstitut für biologischen Landbau (FiBL) for 20 years and now continues to share his knowledge as scientific advisor at several national and international organisations such as Agroscope and FAO.

Anja Hühnlein and Heike Riegler organize the publication of the Julius Kühn Institute's own journals. In her previous career, Heike has researched plant metabolism, with nucleosides, sugars and cell wall in particular, while Anja has a background in plant pathology with focus on potato viruses.