Crises like climate change and loss of biodiversity threaten our planet. That’s why sustainability is an important topic in research and education across Leiden University. On this website you read how scientists from many disciplines work together in researching sustainability.

Join us for Liveable Planet lunch meetings: Liveable communities. We will organise a monthly lunch meeting to inspire and build a sustainability community at the University Leiden.

The Liveable Planet programme assists scientists and local communities in taking up a collective responsibility to develop in a sustainable way. This is done together with a lot of scientist from various disciplines.

Are you a young researcher at Leiden University doing research on sustainability topics? Or are you part of the support staff and passionate about sustainability? Then we are looking for you!

In 2021, Leiden University will develop a new Sustainability Vision 2030. This vision for the future focuses on the primary tasks of the University: integration and visibility of sustainability in our education and research.

The mission of the Plant Science research programme is to contribute to the sustainable production of high quality crops, flowers and high-value bio-based products. This is realised by generating fundamental knowledge of basic biological processes related to development of plants and their interaction…

In our lives we often have little attention or appreciation for plants, let alone the ones we commonly call weeds. This inattention for plants has been described as plant blindness. The Stoepplantjes project aspires to decrease plant blindness by changing the image of weeds and using citizen science.…

The HARVEST project explores the dietary choices that our hominin ancestors and relatives made, by recovering information on what they consumed, and how factors like environmental variation, intrinsic biology, and development of food processing technologies could have influenced their decisions.

The mission of the Plant Sciences cluster is to contribute to the sustainable production of high-quality crops, flowers and high-value bio-based products, and to contribute to the maintenance and restoration of biodiversity in natural ecosystems. This is realised by generating fundamental knowledge…

What plants grow along ditches in the Leiden region? What does this say about vegetation quality? Could it be better? Naturalis and Leiden University's Center for Environmental Sciences are looking for your help to answer these questions.

Plant exudates appeared long time ago in the history line of life in the early Devonian. They are typical saps produced by specialized cells.

Which microorganisms live near and inside plant roots? How do they contribute to plant health? Can microorganisms be employed in plant protection?

Tracking early human behaviour through plant processing and -exploitation.

How is Pol θ responsible for T-DNA integration, and how do other DNA double-strand break repair pathways interact with Pol θ? How may we manipulate T-DNA integration to stimulate error-free integration at a predetermined genomic site?

A three-volume standard work on galls in Europe. Author Johannes C. (Hans) Roskam is associate professor emeritus in Evolutionary Biology and currently guest at Leiden University.

Basketry, cordage and textiles made of plant fibers or bark are rarely preserved in the archaeological record. By means of experimental archaeology and microwear analysis, we obtain indirect evidence about this important craft.

We examine how soil-derived legacy effects of plants structure natural ecosystems, determine aboveground plant insect interactions, and how we can use soil legacy effects to restore degraded ecosystems.

The Plant BioDynamics Lab (PBDL) is a laboratory dedicated to experiments designed to develop and validate quantitative mathematical models of dynamical processes in biology. The principal objective of developing these models is to make quantitative predictions about these processes.

Linking botanical collections, peoples, and illustrations in seventeenth century Dutch Brazil

In this thesis, the role of plant-mediated soil legacy effects in shaping aboveground plant-insect interactions was investigated.

How can we manipulate the biotic and abiotic environment to increase thrips resistance in tomato and chrysanthemum? More specifically we ask: How can plant secondary metabolites that are not soluble in water be delivered to plants in seed coating or root dipping treatment? Can bacteria be used to…

Plant Sciences' contribution to the Evolution & Biodiversity research theme is to understand what are the key drivers of plant biodiversity during evolution with a focus on plant life history and resilience traits and develop tools to restore and maintain plant biodiversity.

Plant Sciences' contribution to the Bioactive Molecules research theme is to identify new plant bioactive molecules, and unravel their mechanisms of action in plant development or health, and the regulatory networks and (bio)synthetic pathways required for their production.

Biodiversity enables ecosystems to thrive through the synergy of functional differences among organisms. While human well-being strongly depends on biodiversity-driven ecosystem services, human actions are also at the root of current unprecedented biodiversity declines.

Plant Sciences' contribution to the Development & Disease research theme is to unravel the processes that allow plants to adapt to changing abiotic and biotic environmental conditions or stresses, with the aim to contribute to the sustainable production of food, flowers and bio-based products using…

Soil biodiversity is of great importance for the maintenance of multifunctionality in terrestrial ecosystems.

The Hortus botanicus Leiden has one of Europe’s largest collections of living plants from the Asian region. This rich resource is no longer the sole domain of botanists. Extraordinary professor Paul Kessler studies what the Hortus botanicus Leiden can offer research, higher education and the public…

How do plants lure microscopically small 'support teams' into their roots for protection against diseases? And what functions are activated in the microbes and the plants?

Plants are colonized by an astounding number of microorganisms that can provide different life-support functions, including nutrient acquisition and protection against (a)biotic stresses like drought or pathogen attack.

Plant Sciences' contribution to the Host-Microbe Interactions research theme is to dissect how microorganisms and microbiomes interact with the plant host and the insects on those plants, and how these insights may be harnessed to improve plant growth and health, by steering microbiome composition and…

Plant-microbe interaction resulted in different physio/chemical responses by host plant and interacting rhizobacteria.

What are key regulators of plant ageing that can reverse ageing in plants (rejuvenation), and how can we use this knowledge to improve crop plants?

The overall objectives of my thesis are to investigate the dynamics of the sorghum root microbiome and to explore the beneficial effects of the root microbiome on sorghum growth and stress tolerance.

This part of the research programme is carried out by Prof. Dr. René Cappers. It focusses on the continuities and changes in the use of plants at Late Neolithic Tell Sabi Abyad, as well as on their implications as proxy evidence for the climate change c. 6200 BC. Parallel to the design of the other…

Plant diversity is essential for us and our planet as it sustains the stability of our ecosystems, provides vital materials and food to us and supports many ecosystem services.

Utilization of plant-originated products as new antibiotics

Which traits did change due to the invasion process of plants and how do these traits contribute to the invasiveness of such species. What is the role of carbohydrate accumulation? What is the function of carbohydrate accumulation in plants? Is genetic variation depleted in invasive species under se…

The 18th edition of SIP will be organised by Caroline Mueller at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. More information can be found on the SIP 2024 Homepage. The 17th Symposium on Insect-Plant relationships in Leiden has been held online from 25 to the 30 July 2021.

What are trait-trait relationships in wetlands? To what extent the so-called leaf economics traits deviate from terrestrial ecosystems? How traits specific to wetland plant relate to plant strategies? What’s the relationship between wetland plant traits to the ecosystem functioning (e.g. productivity,…

Wetland plants are distinguished from plants of other terrestrial ecosystems by their adaptations to specific habitat stresses, including waterlogged and flooding and the subsequent abundance of phytotoxic compounds.

What are the genes and molecular mechanisms involved in bacteria-mediated plant drought tolerance?

Humans have influenced nature since as early as the Ice Age, and over the past century man’s impact has become even greater with our many new technologies and a growing world population. Leiden researchers study this impact and how we can keep it within reasonable limits so that nature can be preserved.…

The soil ecosystem consists of the largest reservoir of biodiversity on Earth.

- How to deconvolute metabolic mixture of precursors and products by biontransformation? - How to optimize the reaction conditions to produce bioactive compounds in biotransformation? - What is the effect of co-treating fungi or bacteria for biotransformations?

What is the effect of light at night on plant phenology and physiology, and how does this affect plant interactions with other species?

How is vegetative development regulated in plants and how does this affect a plant’s life history strategy?

How and why latex bearing plants select specific chemical compounds for eco-chemical interactions with its biotic factors?

Education in (Chinese) Medicinal Plants associated to the Hortus botanicus in Leiden - Which Traditional Chinese Medicinal plants can be grown in the Hortus? - Establishing of a database which Chinese medical plants are available in Dutch Botanical Gardens - Data validation (correct identification,…

The availability of complete plant genome sequences together with the ever increasing amount of data on the molecular, cellular and physiological mechanisms of plant development require mathematical and computational models to obtain a complete overview of and generate new insights into the quantitative…