Prasanth Bendalam

Prasanth Bendalam is an early-stage doctoral researcher (DR) within the Horizon LegumeLegacy Doctoral Network at the Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research – Agroscope (Eidgenöessisches Departement füer Wirtschaft, Bildung und Forschung), under the supervision of Dr. Olivier Huguenin-Elie.

He pursued his first master's in Agronomy in 2019. After that, he completed his second master's in Organic Agriculture and Food Systems from the University of Hohenheim, Germany. He has over ten years of background in studying agriculture with a main focus on sustainability, organic agriculture, climate change and biodiversity topics. Before starting his second master's, Prasanth served as Assistant Professor (Agronomy) for 16 months in India.

In his PhD project with LegumeLegacy, Prasanth Bendalam is aiming at developing multi-species grassland mixtures that improve tolerance to disturbance events and nitrogen efficiency in crop rotation. For this purpose, he will conduct a field experiment to assess the competitive interactions within the communities and the trajectories in species relative abundance as well as in community plant traits that may develop over time, the effect of an intensive trample event on these trajectories, and effects of species and functional group diversity on the depth of nitrogen inputs to the soil.

Project Title

Trajectories in plant species and community traits composition, and depth of nitrogen inputs to the soil.

Supervisors

Dr. Olivier Huguenin-Elie (Primary Supervisor)
Dr. Matthias Suter
Prof. Andreas Lüscher
Dr. Roland Kölliker
Dr. Marie-Noëlle Thivierge