The grant will be used to investigate the link between growth of crops and microbiomes in the soil.
Associate Professor Line Clemmensen and Senior Researcher Michael Krogh Jensen use computermodels based on neural networks to identify the links between satellite images carrying information about the crops and their growth and DNA samples from the soil. This research has significance for society through novel sustainable agriculture possibilities.
In the Villum Foundation announcement they write:
In the pilot project artiMATE, computer science must 'fertilize' the environment when the researchers have to investigate whether a greener agriculture can be created by ensuring the right composition of microbial life in the soil. The project is led by associate professor Line Clemmensen from DTU Compute and senior researcher Michael Krogh Jensen from DTU Biosustain. Using computer models based on artificial intelligence, the researchers will describe the connection between satellite images of the Earth's surface and DNA from the underlying soil layers for thousands of places on Earth:
"The grant makes it possible to launch an ambitious and interdisciplinary collaboration. Images and DNA sequences will contain information about crops and the microbial life from the relevant locations. Using large data sets to describe the growth of microbes, we will try to identify some of the growth-promoting substances that fungi and bacteria exchange, and which the computer models predict may be relevant to crop growth. We hope to be able to develop completely new computer models for use in global predictions of crop growth in relation to the microbial life that lives below the soil surface, says Line Clemmensen, and Michael Krogh Jensen adds:
"Using a new biotechnological method, we will experimentally examine some of the connections that the computer models find between what we see in the satellite images and the life that is in the ground. In this way, we will try to find the signal substances that the earth's fungi and bacteria exchange in order to maintain microbial life. We expect that both computer models and signaling substances will be able to be used to predict crop growth and the maintenance of a rich microbial life for the benefit of greener agriculture.”
The project receives DKK 2,9 mio from the Villum Foundation.
