TRIO
Funding organisation: LOWE- Landes-Offensive zur Entwicklung Wissenschaftlich-ökonomischer Exzellenz
Period: 2024-2027
Contact: Dr. David Windhorst
Aim and Challenge:
The LOEWE collaborative research project TRIO (Transformative Mischkultursysteme für One Health) is funded by the State of Hessen within the framework of the LOEWE state programme. The objective of the consortium is to develop innovative cropping systems that secure yields, enhance ecological functions, and, in particular, enable greater resilience to increasing drought.
Within the LOEWE–TRIO consortium, the Professorship for Landscape-, Water- and Material-Budget provides the central hydrological contribution to the development of drought-resilient cropping systems. In subproject A3, the research group investigates depth-differentiated water uptake of annual and perennial crops in both monocultures and strip intercropping (mixed-cropping systems) using stable water isotopes. These process-based measurements deliver crucial insights into how different cropping systems access soil water and to what extent mixed and strip-cropping systems, in particular, can contribute to enhanced drought resilience. At the same time, the collected data form an essential basis for the validation of hydrological modeling.
Building on this, the professorship develops the hydrological core of the coupled CMF–DSSAT modeling framework in subprojects C2 and C3 by replacing DSSAT’s simplified soil-water module with the process-oriented Catchment Modelling Framework and expanding it with an isotope module. This enables realistic simulations of soil moisture dynamics, water fluxes, and plant water uptake in monocultures and strip-cropping systems. The validated model is subsequently scaled to practical farms and the entire territory of Hessen and applied to climate scenarios to comprehensively evaluate the long-term performance and drought-stress resilience of the cropping systems developed in TRIO.
Links: