Sabine Seidel

Research Focus

My research at the Institute of Organic Farming at the BOKU University (Vienna, Austria) focuses on the development of climate-resilient cropping systems in organic farming, such as mixed cropping systems designed to specifically promote soil fertility, biodiversity and ecosystem services. With a view to sustainable agriculture for the future, I am seeking to increase resource efficiency through, amongst other things, a combination of field experiments, process-based modelling and AI-supported methods.
My research interests include:

• Development and testing of innovative diverse (organic) cropping systems (e.g. identify promising partners and field designs in intercropping)
• Quantification of ecosystem (dis)services including yield and greenhouse gases (measurements and observations)
• Model-based improvement of the understanding of (Gx)G×E×M interactions (focus: water, N, roots) in cropping systems
• Identification of promising crop traits and field designs for future climates
• Short- and long-term soil organic carbon, soil water and nutrient dynamics
• Simulation of the water dynamics from the soil through the soil, root, shoot and stomata into the atmosphere using agro-ecosystem models.
• Roots: field observations and modelling root growth with focus on the effect of nutrient deficiency and/or drought stress on root growth
• Digital Farming / Development and application of AI tools in agriculture (e.g. detecting pollinators in images and videos), digital twin development

After studying agricultural sciences at the Technical University of Munich and completing my doctorate on crop modeling and irrigation at the Chair of Hydrology at the Technical University of Dresden, I have been a postdoc at the Institute of Crop Sciences and Resource Conservation (Crop Sciences Group) at the University of Bonn since 2016. I worked as a postdoc at the same group on the BMBF-funded project “Soil3 – Sustainable Subsoil Management,” which aims to explore how and to what degree the subsoil can be managed to secure or even increase plant yields by improving the overall nutrient and water use efficiency of crops. Since May 2020, I have been a research group leader at the Chair of Crop Science as part of the PhenoRob Cluster of Excellence (DFG). The research group, entitled “Optimizing crop mixtures for a sustainable and climate-resilient crop production by combining field experiments and crop models,” strengthens PhenoRob especially at the interface of crop modeling, ecology, and crop and soil science. I actively participated in four out of six core projects within the PhenoRob Cluster of Excellence. My research within PhenoRob included: (i) Data analytics, simulation of sensor signals (sEIT), and process-based forecasting of root and crop growth, soil dynamics, and the impacts of potential interventions, (ii) Robot-based selective weeding for improved biodiversity, (iii) The optimization of crop mixtures for sustainable and climate-resilient crop production by combining field experiments and crop models (my research group), (iv) Phenotyping over scales, combining destructive on-site measurements such as root and shoot observations with UAV-based cameras, and (v) Non-destructive diagnosis of nutrient deficiencies using deep learning algorithms. Since 2025, I am Professor of Organic Farming at BOKU University in Vienna.

Full publication list: https://nise81.com/corp/sabine/publications