Research
In order to achieve food security for the growing world population, agricultural production is increasingly faced with the task of ensuring the quality and yield of harvests even under difficult environmental conditions. The demands placed on plant nutrition research are also changing: whereas in the past, the reactions of plants to nutrients were usually investigated under otherwise satisfactory growth conditions, limiting factors must now be taken into account to a greater extent. These include, for example, water scarcity, heat stress and soil salinity.
The experiments at IAPN serve basic and application-oriented research at the interface of plant nutrition and plant physiology. The aim is to understand more and more precisely how nutrients like magnesium, potassium, and nitrogen influence both plant physiological processes and the plant's own mechanisms for protection against stress and deficiency situations. This way, we are striving to create a knowledge base that enables recommendations for resource efficient nutrient and fertilizer management also under unfavorable environmental conditions.
