Meret Daria Kaspereit

Meret Kaspereit is a doctoral researcher at Aarhus university in Denmark, employed within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action “LegumeLegacy”. In August 2023 she finished her Master's degree in agricultural sciences with the specialization in crop sciences at Kiel university in Germany. Meret's interests and skills lie especially in grassland science, particularly at the interface between plant and ruminant production. Her background combines both practical experience, gained working on a dairy farm in New Zealand, as well as scientific know-how from conducting field experiments in forage and crop production as a student researcher at Kiel university.

The project she is currently working on as a PhD fellow especially aims to understand the dynamics of species shifts within mixtures, to optimize niche complementarity and enable a targeted design of multispecies grassland with continuously high yields and forage quality, as well as ecosystem service provision. The investigation of underlying processing driving sward dynamics, including the role of plant functional traits will be focused on in the project. The results shall be fed into models suited to capture the benefits of diverse grasslands for sustainable agriculture.

Project Title

Understanding the dynamics of species composition and the role of functional traits in multispecies grasslands to maximize benefits across crop rotations.

Supervisors

Dr. Carsten Malisch (Primary Supervisor)
Prof. Jørgen Eriksen
Prof. Chris Reynolds