Alexis Carteron

Purpan Engineering School | EIP

The global retreat of glaciers is dramatically altering mountain and high-latitude landscapes, with new ecosystems developing from apparently barren substrates1–4. The study of these emerging ecosystems is critical to understanding how climate change interacts with microhabitat and biotic communities and determines the future of ice-free terrains1,...

The development of terrestrial ecosystems depends greatly on plant mutualists such as mycorrhizal fungi. The global retreat of glaciers exposes nutrient‐poor substrates in extreme environments and provides a unique opportunity to study early successions of mycorrhizal fungi by assessing their dynamics and drivers. We combined environmental DNA meta...

The mechanisms underlying plant succession remain highly debated. Due to the local scope of most studies, we lack a global quantification of the relative importance of species addition ‘versus’ replacement. We assessed the role of these processes in the variation (β-diversity) of plant communities colonizing the forelands of 46 retreating glaciers...

The worldwide retreat of glaciers is causing a faster than ever increase in ice‐free areas that are leading to the emergence of new ecosystems. Understanding the dynamics of these environments is critical to predicting the consequences of climate change on mountains and at high latitudes. Climatic differences between regions of the world could modu...

Protists are major actors of soil communities and play key roles in shaping food webs, community assembly, and ecosystem processes, yet their functional diversity is understudied. High-throughput sequencing data have revealed their ubiquity and diversity, but lack of standardized traits has hampered the integration of functional information, limiti...

Protists are major actors of soil communities and play key roles in shaping food webs, community assembly, and ecosystem processes, yet their functional diversity is understudied. High-throughput sequencing data have revealed their ubiquity and diversity, but lack of standardized traits has hampered the integration of functional information, limiti...

Leaf spectra are integrated foliar phenotypes that capture a range of traits and can provide insight into ecological processes. Leaf traits, and therefore leaf spectra, may reflect belowground processes such as mycorrhizal associations. However, evidence for the relationship between leaf traits and mycorrhizal association is mixed, and few studies...

Mechanisms underlying plant succession remain highly debated. A global quantification of the relative importance of species addition versus replacement is lacking due to the local scope of most studies. We quantified their role in the variation of plant communities colonizing the forelands of 46 retreating glaciers distributed worldwide, using both...

Ice‐free areas are expanding worldwide due to the dramatic glacier shrinkage and undergo rapid colonization by multiple lifeforms, thus representing key environments to study ecosystem development. It has been proposed that colonization dynamics of deglaciated terrains is different between surface and deep soils, but that the heterogeneity between...

Ectomycorrhizas and arbuscular mycorrhizas, the two most widespread plant–fungal symbioses, are thought to differentially influence tree species diversity, with positive plant–soil feedbacks favouring locally abundant ectomycorrhizal tree species and negative feedbacks promoting species coexistence and diversity in arbuscular mycorrhizal forests. W...

Ice-free areas are increasing worldwide due to the dramatic glacier shrinkage and are undergoing rapid colonization by multiple lifeforms, thus representing key environments to study ecosystem development. Soils have a complex vertical structure. However, we know little about how microbial and animal communities differ across soil depths and develo...

It has been proposed that ectomycorrhizal (EcM) fungi slow down decomposition by competing with free-living saprotrophs for organic nutrients and other soil resources (known as the “Gadgil effect”), thereby increasing soil carbon sequestration. As such, this Gadgil effect should depend on soil organic matter age and quality, but this remains unstud...

In temperate and boreal forests, competition for soil resources between free-living saprotrophs and ectomycorrhizal (EcM) fungi has been suggested to restrict saprotrophic fungal dominance to the most superficial organic soil horizons in forests dominated by EcM trees. By contrast, lower niche overlap with arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi could al...

With steep climatic gradients over short distances, montane ecosystems provide exceptional opportunities to study ecological responses to climate and other environmental changes. Here we present a summary and synthesis of 10 years of research on this theme in a protected area in southern Québec, Canada (Parc National du Mont Mégantic), with ecologi...

It has been proposed that ectomycorrhizal (EcM) fungi slow down decomposition by competing with free-living saprotrophs for organic nutrients and other soil resources (known as the "Gadgil effect"), thereby increasing soil carbon sequestration. As such, this Gadgil effect should depend on soil organic matter age and quality, but this remains unstud...

Ectomycorrhizas and arbuscular mycorrhizas, the two most widespread plant-fungal symbioses, are thought to differentially influence tree species diversity, with positive plant-soil feedbacks favoring locally abundant ectomycorrhizal tree species and negative feedbacks promoting species coexistence and diversity in arbuscular mycorrhizal forests. Wh...

Bogs, as nutrient-poor ecosystems, are particularly sensitive to atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition. Nitrogen deposition alters bog plant community composition and can limit their ability to sequester carbon (C). Spectroscopy is a promising approach for studying how N deposition affects bogs because of its ability to remotely determine changes in...

Climate warming is expected to cause the poleward and upward elevational expansion of temperate plant species, but non‐climatic factors such as soils could constrain this range expansion. However, the extent to which edaphic constraints on range expansion have an abiotic (e.g. soil chemistry) or biotic (e.g. micro‐organisms) origin remains undeterm...

Due to habitat fragmentation, resource disruption and pollution, urbanization is one of the most destructive forms of anthropization affecting ecosystems worldwide. Generally, human-mediated perturbations dramatically alter species diversity in urban sites compared to the surroundings, thus influencing the functioning of the entire ecosystem. We in...

Many tank bromeliads have facultative relationships with ants as is the case in French Guiana between Aechmea aquilega (Salib.) Griseb. and the trap-jaw ant, Odontomachus haematodus Linnaeus. Using a redundancy analysis, we determined that the presence of O. haematodus colonies is accompanied by a greater quantity of fine particulate organic matter...

Dealing with mining and ecosystem restoration is always a challenge. It becomes even harder when the country has the incredible honour to belong to the top ten listed countries for biodiversity preservation. New Caledonia is one of those. It has a very rich and diverse flora composed by 3.371 species, with an endemism rate of 75%. These are due to...

Investigation of patterns in beta diversity has received increased attention over the last years particularly in light of new ecological theories such as the metapopulation paradigm and metacommunity theory. Traditionally, beta diversity patterns can be described by cluster analysis (i.e. dendrograms) that enables the classification of samples. Clu...