The Tropical Biodiversity Group focuses its research mainly on these areas:
- The role of agroforestry in biodiversity conservation by comparing various land use systems, we investigate the potential of agroforestry as agricultural practice to conserve biodiversity of different taxa of plants as well as animals (trees, herbaceous plants, insects, small mammals etc.)
- Agroforestry tree domestication - tree diversity (morphological, genetic and chemical), tree farmers‘ preferences in agroforestry systems, vegetative propagation, genetic diversity of tropical crops and trees
- Neglected/underutilized plant species
By use of molecular markers we research the genetic diversity of wild and cultivated populations of crops and trees throughout tropical areas for conservational and domestication purposes. Currently, we are focus on underutilized trees (baobab, bitter kola in Africa, camu-camu in Peruvian Amazon), local landraces of rice in Myanmar, landraces of cocoa in Ecuador and Guatemala, and Guatemalan avocado varieties.