Klara Mrak
Education
Starting in landscape architecture, Klara studied at the University of Ljubljana in the largely forest-covered Slovenia. She spent an exchange year at the Dresden University of Technology, where she wrote her B.Sc. thesis on modelling the recharging capacity of a groundwater body and developed a landscape planning concept for a municipality in Saxony.Klara worked as a landscape architect for a while until starting a M.Sc. in Agronomy at the University of Ljubljana, where she was most interested in soil science and agroecology. She spent a year on exchange at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna, stayed there and focused on biogeochemistry. She worked as a student research assistant at the Crop Production department and a tutor at the Biogeochemistry and Rhizosphere Ecology Group, where she was involved in projects on nutrient cycling in the rhizosphere and plant nutrition. She wrote her thesis titled “The Effect of pH on Phosphate Solubility in Soils” with Walter Wenzel in the Biogeochemistry and Rhizosphere Ecology Group.
PhD Reasearch Project
In February 2021, she joined the RTG as a member of the Department of Soil Science of Temperate Ecosystems. Klara will contribute to the overarching goal of assessing the impacts of coniferous admixtures to Beech forests by looking into soil-plant nutrient fluxes in the ecosystem and predicting the effects of admixing Douglas fir into them.Matter cycling and nutrient efficiency in mixed and pure stands