Wednesday 26 February at 2 PM, Jacob Weiner (University of Copenhagen) will give a seminar at Utrecht University. Jacob is an amazing speaker, excellent (agro-)ecologist and full of inspiring ideas on how modulation of shade avoidance in crops can help to sustainably suppress weeds.
Check out Jacob’s work through his website.
Interested? get in touch for specifics on room number etc.

Update 27 Feb: Jacob’s seminar was amazing and such an inspiring example of seeing the joy in science. Title and abstract are pasted below.

Applying Evolutionary Theory to Improve Plant Production

Jacob Weiner

Evolutionary theory can be applied to improve agricultural yields and/or sustainability. The basic idea is that it is very unlikely that plant breeding or genetic engineering can improve attributes already favored by millions of years of natural selection, but there may be unutilized potential in selecting for attributes that increase total crop yield but reduce plants’ individual fitness. In other words, plant breeding should be based on group, not individual, selection. In this seminar, I present the theoretical evolutionary and agronomic background for this approach, show recent results testing the core hypothesis, and discuss the potential mechanisms and implications for plant breeding.