Research interests: Biodemography, method development for ageing research, plant demography.
Johan is a plant demographer with two primary interests. One is assessing and understanding age trajectories of demographic rates. The main research questions here are “How do plants age (do they, like birds and mammals, senesce)?” and “How important is it to account for age-distributions in population projections?”. Within the DFF (Danish independent research fund) supported project “SEAD-Plant”, Johan and colleagues assess these questions using field biology, herb chronology, and statistical modeling of populations.
Johan’s other main research interest is to understand how the environment drives the demography, population dynamics, and ultimately distribution patterns, of plants. This work is partly supported by the Swedish research council FORMAS and by CPop, and is based on field measurements of demographic rates and climatic, non-climatic abiotic and biotic drivers of these rates. The collected data is analyzed using Integral Projection Models, with the aim of answering the fundamental population-ecological question of what drives dynamic spatio-temporal distribution patterns of populations, for a set of model species.
