Curriculum Vitae
2010-present:
PhD student in the Terrestrial Ecology department of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology
2005-2010:
BaSc and MSc degree in Biology at Ghent University (Belgium).
Projects
My PhD project came to existence thanks to a research prosal written by my supervisors, which is now executed as a subproject within a large research program supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). This research program is entitled "The Jena Experiment", a long-term grassland biodiversity experiment aimed at investigating plant biodiversity effects on ecosystem processes and functions. This experiment was set up in 2002 on former arable land near the German city of Jena. Its design encompasses monocultures and mixtures of 60 native plant species typical for Molinio-Arrhenatheretea meadows, and allows to assess plant species diversity and (pre-defined) plant functional diversity effects on every ecosystem process you can come up with (see Roscher et al. 2004 for details on the experimental design).
An overview of the different research projects within the Jena Project can be found here.
In this PhD project, we will explore plant-soil biotic interactions within the framework of the Jena experiment. More specifically, we concentrate on soil microbial communities and nematodes. First, we try to understand how these soil communities are structured in a plant diversity gradient. Second, we aim to understand how plant community effects on soil biota affect the functioning of these communities, i.e. the way they feedback to plant performance and influence ecosystem processes. Our initial experimental approach consists of (a) exploring plant species specific effects on soilborne biota that are intimately linked with plant performance (pathogens, parasites, mutualists) and (b) relate individual plant-soil feedbacks to interactive plant-soil feedbacks by quantifying microbial mediated plant-plant interactions in plant mixtures and linking these to in-depth analysis of key biotic players in plant-soil feedbacks.
supervisors: Wim van der Putten, Gerlinde De Deyn and George Kowalchuck.
The paper of Roscher et al. (2004) can be downloaded below.
Selected Publications
Cortois R, De Deyn GB (2011) The curse of the black box. Plant and Soil. in press.
Links
http://www.the-jena-experiment.de/
Downloads
Roscher et al. 2004. Basic and Applied Ecology 5: 107-121.
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