Savanna van Mesdag

Savanna van Mesdag is a Plant Ecologist at Rothamsted Research, in the Strategic Area: Agroecosystem Health and Pest Management. Her broad interests, including current areas of investigation, are ecology, botany, community ecology, statistical analysis, habitats, geochemistry and entomology. She is researching and answering questions about plant communities present in the off-crop in-field area, such as in hedgerows, verges and field margins. Savanna has been exploring different statistical methods for effectively classifying and determining plant communities present and will soon be exploring the following: 1) effects of field management on community functionality and functional diversity and 2) functional communities’ contributions to ecosystem services. Additional explorations into such species communities and functional communities may involve the investigation of such communities on organic and conventional farms, and determining species communities present in additional European countries. To answer these questions, Savanna collates large amounts of weed data from previous research, analysing the data using various packages in R, including vegan, vegclust and RMAVIS, with additional investigations in QGIS. Additionally, she helps with Rothamsted Research fieldwork, with previous experience in AgZero+ vegetation (species) identification.