CROP DIVERSITY AND SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE: MECHANISMS, DESIGNS AND APPLICATIONS

Dr. Long Li, Professor at China Agricultural University. He has continuously worked on intercropping research and application for more than 30 years in terms of interspecific competition and facilitation on nutrients between crop species, overyielding, root distributions, rhizosphere processes, phosphorus mobilization, biological N₂ fixation and long-term soil fertility effects. His research interests are to integrate the research knowledge of agricultural intercropping into more broaden context in ecology. At the same time, he has endeavored to understand how crop diversity enhance ecosystem service and functions in agroecosystems. He also has tried his best to apply the research knowledge of intercropping to farmers’ fields in practice

Dr. Wopke van der Werf, Associate professor at the Centre for Crop Systems Analysis, Wageningen University. His work combines statistical and modeling approaches with experiments to gain deeper understanding in the functioning of agro-ecological systems. Intercropping has had his great interest since the 1990s when his first PhD student studied biological control of cotton aphid in wheat-cotton intercrops in China. It is his ambition to help unlock the potential of intercropping for developing a more environmentally benign and productive agriculture. This unlocking requires insight in how and why intercropping works or can work in different production situations across the globe

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RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2021. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)