Parasitic Plants in African Agriculture

Lytton John Musselman is Mary Payne Hogan Professor Botany, and Manager of the Blackwater Ecologic Preserve in the Department of Biological Sciences at Old Dominion where he also served as Department Chair. His research centres on the biology of parasitic angiosperms, especially those in the Middle East and Africa. Recipient of four Fulbright Awards (Sudan, West Bank, Jordan, Brunei Darussalam), he has also been a Visiting Professor at the American University of Beirut, and the American University of Iraq-Sulaimani. He is co-founder and co-editor of Haustorium, the newsletter of the International Parasitic Plants Society, and served as a consultant to the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas. His most recent books are Edible Wild Plants of the Carolinas: A Forager's Companion (with Peter W. Schafran) 2021, and Solomon Described Plants: A Botanical Guide to Plant Life in the Bible (2022).

Jonne Rodenburg is Professor of Agronomy at the Natural Resources Institute of the University of Greenwich, the UK, where he teaches postgraduate students on weed and parasitic weed biology and management, agronomy and crop physiology. He researches sustainable agricultural intensification and the biology, ecology and management of parasitic weeds in annual field crop production systems in Africa. He worked and published extensively on root parasitic weeds, both obligate and facultative, as recipient of grants including from the Dutch Research Council NWO, the UKRI Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and The Royal Society. From 2004 to 2018 he worked at the Africa Rice Center as agronomist focussing on weed management in rice, with subsequent home bases in Mali, Benin, Senegal, Tanzania and Côte d'Ivoire. He is the current vice-president and president-elect of the International Parasitic Plants Society, subject editor at the European Weed Research Society journal Weed Research, published by Wiley, and associate editor at the Elsevier journal Field Crops Research.