Plants are the basis of terrestrial life. To ensure their survival, they have developed strategies to cope with changes in their environment, especially by means of robustness, i.e. maintaining functions despite disturbances. Given the increasing human impact on our planet, understanding the mechanisms and limits of plant resilience is crucial for the development of effective and knowledge-based strategies that help to preserve plant ecosystems and ensure agricultural productivity.
The GreenRobust Cluster of Excellence pools the expertise of the Universities of Tübingen, Heidelberg, and Hohenheim to elucidate the principles of the robustness of plant life. In so doing, it focuses on three areas of research:
- investigating climatic and biotic disturbances;
- the influence of disturbances on the different levels of biological organization, from molecules to populations;
- studies on diversity within a selected group of species from plant families of ecological and agricultural importance.
To this end, GreenRobust will analyze newly acquired and existing data sets and use network theory and artificial intelligence to develop and test models that describe the mechanisms of plant robustness.
