Anne-Caroline Prevot

CNRS - Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle · CESCO

L’oubli des conditions environnementales passées constitue un problème sérieux conduisant à accepter une perte de biodiversité par manque de connaissances. Alors que ce problème est bien connu, peu d’articles étudient le rôle de la mémoire de l’environnement passé dans la conservation. Dans cet article, nous montrons à travers une approche interdis...

Le présent article rend compte d’un travail d’analyse narrative de « récits de nature » produits dans le cadre du projet « Le bruit des loups » par 456 élèves de 6 à 20 ans au moment de leur réalisation, scolarisées dans des écoles primaires, des collèges et des lycées autour de Paris et Fréjus (France). À travers ce travail, nous souhaitons interr...

We examine the role of phenomenological environmental memories to understand environmental changes and favor conservation in Dakar, Senegal, a context of great environmental change and historical traditions of oral memory transmission, where we conducted 42 semi-structured interviews in nine neighborhoods. Our results indicate that experienced envi...

Citizen science projects are valued for their impact on participants' knowledge, attitude and behavior towards science. In this paper, we explore how participation in biodiversity citizen science projects is correlated to different dimensions of trust in science. We conduct a quantitative study through an online survey of 1,199 individuals, 586 of...

Urban greenery in cities is important for human health, for resilient and sustainable cities, and for flora and fauna. The importance of urban greenery is highlighted in numerous global, national and local policies. However, the rapid increase of urban sprawl and densification globally has reduced access, availability and quality of urban greenery....

Broadening citizen participation in biodiversity governance is often presented as a priority by public institutions. Citizens’ engagement in policy design fostering the protection of biodiversity would indeed allow two-way knowledge transfers between expert knowledge and local knowledge; it would also enable citizens to influence collective choices...

Qu’est-ce que la notion de nature évoque pour les Français ? Quelle relation entretiennent-ils avec les milieux naturels, la faune et la flore ? Quel regard portent-ils sur les aires naturelles protégées ? Comment appréhendent-ils l’urbanisation des espaces naturels ? Perçoivent-ils les menaces qui pèsent sur la biodiversité ? Sont-ils convaincus d...

Identifying the determinants of people’s connection with nature is crucial for the future of nature conservation. The sense of connection with nature may be defined as how one relates to the natural world or sees oneself as part of it. A part of this connection is related to what is called “Environmental Identity”, which begins to form early in lif...

The diversity of insects is tremendous and so is the effort needed to assess it in order to better understand insect ecology as well as their role for the functioning of ecosystems. While the interest of academics and naturalists for these species has always existed, it is only recently that such interest started to reach society more generally. Fr...

Un an après la sortie du dernier rapport de l’IPBES et quelques mois après le confinement imposé par la crise du Covid-19, ce texte propose quelques pistes pour comprendre pourquoi la nature a disparu des aspirations communes des sociétés modernes (notamment en France), alors même que les relations avec elle sont fondamentales pour nos vies humaine...

In the context of ecological crisis, agricultural issues become increasingly present in public debates and there is a call for to better understand the relations between farmers and nonhumans. Based on care theory and through an ethnographic study conducted on 20 winegrowers in Hérault (France), this article answers 3 questions: 1) How do farmers r...

In an era characterized by fast and drastic global changes, the scientific community highly values the long-term dimension of environmental monitoring programmes. This article focuses on the affective dimension of the management of these programmes when specifically involving volunteers during their working time. Drawing on an empirical study of tw...

Addressing the biodiversity crisis requires renewed collaborative approaches. Large carnivores are ambassador species, and as such they can aid the protection of a wide range of species, including evolutionarily distinct and threatened ones, while being popular for conservation marketing. However, conflicts between carnivores and people present a c...

Addressing the biodiversity crisis requires renewed collaborative approaches. Large carnivores are ambassador species, and as such they can aid the protection of a wide range of species, including evolutionarily distinct and threatened ones, while being popular for conservation marketing. However, conflicts between carnivores and people present a c...

Measuring the impacts of urban pollution on biodiversity is important to identify potential adaptations and mitigations needed for preserving wildlife even in city centers. Foot deformities are ubiquitous in urban pigeons. The reasons for these mutilations have been debated, as caused by frequenting a highly zoonotic environment, by chemical or mec...

Regular contact with urban nature has been shown to have positive effects on human health and cognitive and psychological restoration. Although complex and multisensory, the sensory part of the experience of nature has been primarily studied through vision and audition. In contrast, despite its importance in the formation of human self and identity...

Large carnivores are ambassador species, and as such they can aid the protection of a widerange of species, including evolutionarily distinct and threatened ones, while being popular for conservation marketing. However, conflicts between carnivores and people present a considerable challenge to biodiversity conservation. Our cross disciplinary essa...

Biodiversity is undergoing a major crisis. Institutions, while launching initiatives tackling the issue, are using and diffusing the term biodiversity and related expert knowledge. However, to collectively address the biodiversity crisis, it is important that actors are able to communicate with each other. This is particularly true in the three-par...

Biodiversity is undergoing a major crisis. Institutions, while launching initiatives tackling the issue, are using and diffusing the term biodiversity and related expert knowledge. However, to collectively address the biodiversity crisis, it is important that actors are able to communicate with each other. This is particularly true in the three-par...

Halting the on-going biodiversity crisis requires large individual behavioural changes through the implementation of more pro-environmental behaviours (PEBs) by every citizen. People’s experiences of nature, such as outdoor activities, have been identified as great enhancers of such behaviours. Yet, these experiences of nature got scarcer in the la...

The Karthala Forest (Comoros) is currently the subject of a national protection policy, in conjunction with the international community. This policy may be more or less in line with the perceptions and expectations of the residents of the forest. In order to better understand these issues, we have studied the representations of the forest by local...

The 20th century has been marked by a larger space left for citizen participation in the public arena. However, the impact of these initiatives remains to be investigated. This article explores the way a science-based program promoting citizen initiatives for biodiversity can encourage adults’ involvement. It is based on the example of an environme...

This study examines individual commitment to biodiversity during adulthood. We studied the interrelations between everyday experiences of nature, knowledge about biodiversity, connectedness with nature, and implementation of specific pro-biodiversity practices, through a survey covering 473 adults in Paris surroundings (France). More specifically,...

Community gardens are increasingly implemented in cities and considered in public policies regarding the range of expected benefits they can provide. Much research has indeed emphasized their roles for community gardens members, but little research still concerns residents' perspectives. In this paper, we explored the importance of these gardens fo...

In a globally urbanizing world, interactions between individuals and nature are progressively decreasing. In this context, it is not uncommon that the presence of some remaining animal species in cities causes problems to urban citizens and results in conflicts among stakeholders. Here, we propose a novel vision of the relations between urban citiz...

Urbanisation introduces deep changes in habitats, eventually creating new urban ecosystems where ecological functions are driven by human activities. The higher frequency of some phenotypes in urban vs rural/wild areas has led to the assumption that directional selection in urban habitats occurs, which may thereby favour some behavioural and physio...

Modern lifestyles have increased a separation between humans and nature while also integrating technology into daily life. The use of technology has not only supplanted people's traditional experiences with nature but begun to change them: Through videos and documentaries , we can discover windows opened onto wilderness, landscapes, places, and spe...

The increasing levels of stress entailed by contemporary urban lifestyles can lead to a greater desire to escape from cities. The restorative sense of ‘being away’ produced by natural environments has been substantially explored in greenspaces but little studied in zoos, which endeavour to immerse visitors in a local or exotic environment through b...

Feral pigeons can reach high densities in the urban environments and have thus been subject to various regulation programs. Recently, an alternative ethical regulation strategy based on the installation of artificial breeding facilities has been tested in European cities. In Paris (France), pigeons are first confined for several weeks within the pi...

Community-based efforts are essential to address urban social-ecological challenges. Here, we focus on French community gardens. Through participant observation and semistructured interviews, this study seeks to provide empirical evidence on: (1) what motivates volunteer gardeners in French community gardens to undertake this activity, (2) what pr...

Keywords: human-nature relationship, experience of nature, sensory experience of nature, olfactory experience, smell sensitivity, uses of nature spaces In the 21 st century, western societies appear more and more separated from nature, notably in urban contexts (Soga & Gaston, 2016). However, regular contacts with urban nature have been shown to ha...

Poster presentation for the IV Rocío Martín Herreros award for Research in Environmental Psychology

Urban species often adjust their behavior to survive in urban environments, characterized by the proximity of humans, habitat fragmentation and heterogeneous, fluctuating ecological resources. Several hypotheses have been put forth to explain how species manage living in heterogeneous and complex anthropogenic habitats. The ability of individuals o...

La nature nous relie les uns aux autres et à l’ensemble du vivant.Mais quelles expériences avons-nous aujourd’hui de la nature ?Celles-ci, ou leur absence, façonnent-elles nos façons de vivre et de penser, d’agir et de gouverner ? Existe-t-il une valeur ajoutée de l’expérience de nature pour l’éthique et la politique ? Il est urgent de préserver un...

The biodiversity crisis is not salient to many people. A zoo visit not only provides the opportunity to learn about the issue, but also provides direct experiences with animals that may increase public engagement. The present study used a nonequivalent pretest–posttest design to assess the impact of a zoo visit on conservation knowledge and engagem...

Much research has explored the effects of being in natural areas on human health, well-being and environmental concern. However, the combined effects of urbanization, biodiversity loss and the Western way of life reduce the opportunities to experience nature. Landscape management could play a prominent role in providing opportunities and motivation...

This paper addresses the issue of managing urban pigeon population using some possible actions that make it reach a density target with respect to socio-ecological constraints. A mathematical model describing the dynamic of this population is introduced. This model incorporates the effect of some regulatory actions on the dynamic of this population...

In the 21st century, western societies appear more and more separated from nature, notably in urban contexts (Soga & Gaston, 2016). However, regular contacts with urban nature have been shown to have positive effects on human health, cognitive and psychological restoration (Bratman et al. 2012). The experience of nature is complex and multisensory....

The success of conservation efforts largely depends on broad-based public support. However, the growing separation between people and elements of nature, due to global processes such as urbanization, may decrease individual connection with nature and public support for conservation. Encouraging interactions between people and nature becomes, theref...

The biodiversity crisis is not salient to many people. A zoo visit not only provides the opportunity to learn about the issue, but also provides direct experiences with animals that may increase public engagement. The present study used a nonequivalent pretest–posttest design to assess the impact of a zoo visit on conservation knowledge and engagem...

Despite decades of awareness about the biodiversity crisis, it remains a wicked problem. Besides preservation and restoration strategies, one approach has focused on increasing public concern about biodiversity issues by emphasizing opportunities for people to experience natural environments. In this essay, we endeavor to complicate the understandi...

In the current biodiversity crisis, conservation scientists are urgently asked to involve themselves in education and communication initiatives toward non-scientists, who are considered as lacking knowledge to correctly value biodiversity. This is particularly argued in urban areas. In this paper, we showed however with an anthropological survey th...

Education has been proposed as an important way to increase environmental concern. Beyond providing information, education could also encourage a stable sense of oneself as connected to the natural world, or environmental identity (EID), which is a predictor of environmental concern and behavior. This study explored the relative roles of environmen...

Avoidance of mating between related individuals is usually considered adaptive because it decreases the probability of inbreeding depression in offspring. However, mating between related partners can be adaptive if outbreeding depression is stronger than inbreeding depression or if females gain inclusive fitness benefits by mating with close kin. I...

La tendencia dominante de las ciencias de la conservación y del urbanismo, ha buscado detener el deterioro ambiental estableciendo una base ética de actitudes consideradas apropiadas para conservar una naturaleza particular. A través del estudio de 9 jardines comunitarios parisinos, mostramos los límites que muestra esta aproximación al limitar la...

Lancé en 2007, le projet du Grand Paris présente la capitale comme la ville durable de demain. Cet article s’appuie sur une étude des textes relatifs à ce projet d’une part, et sur l’analyse d’entretiens réalisés avec des acteurs participant à son élaboration d’autre part, pour interroger un des critères de durabilité qui sous-tendent cette affirma...

Different hypotheses exist to explain the ability of individuals or species to modify their behaviours in response to the urban environment. Our study addresses risk-taking in urban birds as an essential behavioural change in cities allowing the species to manage living in anthropic habitats. Specifically, we tested role of phylogeny and the enviro...

In the modern era of urban human development, the occidental way of life has increased a separation between humans and nature, together with a delegation of our sensory and cognitive abilities to technologies. For example, we delegate our senses of direction to GPS and other GoogleMap, our memory to search engines, and we make all calculations not...

Besides direct impacts of urban biodiversity on local ecosystem services, the contact of city dwellers with urban nature in their everyday life could increase their awareness on conservation issues. In this paper, we focused on a particularly common animal urban species, the feral pigeon Columba livia. Through an observational approach, we examined...

Biodiversity monitoring is increasingly assessed through citizen-science volunteer programs. Standardized protocols are proposed by scientists to naturalist or non-naturalist volunteers who collect data in a consultative approach. Biodiversity indicators can then be assessed and communicated to inform decision-making at local to international polic...

‘Nuisance species’ (or ‘invasive’ species) are often proposed to be the second most important concern in the context of the current biodiversity crisis. Despite increasing evidence that exotic species do not always become invasive, this perception is still common in the scientific community. This suggests that other issues are at stake in the conce...

This paper addresses the evolution of nature conceptions in the last two decades as a response to the global ecological crisis and the parallel redefinition of landscape and society-environment relations it implies. Contemporary scholars now increasingly emphasize that natural conditions are not separate from social processes. Thinking nature and h...

Understanding the genetic connectivity among populations of spreading and problematic species is important to determine the spatial scale at which management actions need to be conducted. The feral pigeon (Columba livia) is considered to be a pest or an invasive species in many cities around the world, leading to frequent attempts to control its po...

The assumed ongoing disconnection between humans and nature in Western societies represents a profoundly challenging conservation issue. Here, we demonstrate one manifestation of this nature disconnection, via an examination of the representation of natural settings in a 70-year time series of Disney animated films. We found that natural settings a...

Urbanisation introduces deep changes in habitats, eventually creating new urban ecosystems where ecological functions are driven by human activities. The higher frequency of some phenotypes in urban vs rural/wild areas has led to the assumption that directional selection in urban habitats occurs, which may thereby favour some behavioural and physio...

Urbanisation introduces deep changes in habitats, eventually creating new urban ecosystems where ecological functions are driven by human activities. The higher frequency of some phenotypes in urban vs rural/wild areas has led to the assumption that directional selection in urban habitats occurs, which may thereby favour some behavioural and physio...

Urbanization is a major challenge for biodiversity conservation, yet the evolutionary processes taking place in urbanized areas remain poorly known. Human activities in cities set new selective forces in motion which need to be investigated to predict the evolutionary responses of animal species living in urban areas. In this study, we investigated...

Public involvement is one of the keys to achieving biodiversity conservation goals. Increasing public involvement in conservation activities requires investigation into what makes people more aware of nature, especially in an ordinary and local context, in their everyday lives. Among the initiatives developed to increase the public's awareness of c...

Urban conservation education programs aim to increase knowledge and awareness towards biodiversity and to change attitudes and behaviour towards the environment. However, to date, few urban conservation education studies have evaluated to what extent these programs have managed to achieve their goals. In this study, we experimentally explored the i...

The questionnaire identifying social and pro-environmental profiles and garden-related information was presented to adult participants during the activity days. (DOCX)

The interview guidelines followed (set of themes and questions used to frame the interview). Face-to-face interviews were conducted, three and a half months after the activity days. (DOCX)

Methods for the general survey in the gardens that was done independently from the activity days and allows comparing participants to general visitors. (DOC)

Description of the social and pro-environmental profiles of the participants interviewed a few months after the activity days. (XLSX)

This paper is an answer to the Caplat and Coutts forum about our previous paper "The need for flexibility in conservation practices: exotic species as an example". We precise here why we proposed to consider exotic species as well as indigenous species in the reconnection framework in human-modified environments. One argument is that consistent and...

Considered as plague in many cities, pigeons in urban areas live close to human activities and exploit this proximity to find food which is often directly delivered by people. In this study, we explored the capacity of feral pigeons to take advantage of this human-based food resource and discriminate between friendly and hostile people. Our study w...

To garner support for biodiversity from the World's human population, conservation biologists need an open-minded, integrated conservation strategy. We suggest that this strategy should include efforts to (1) preserve existing high quality, diverse ecosystems, (2) remediate impaired systems, (3) balance the needs of people and ecological resources,...

Reproduction management of natural popsulations can have long-term consequences that have to be examined to avoid unwanted side effects. Management policies of urban Pigeons (Columba livia Gmelin, 1789) include the set up of public Pigeon houses that aim at limiting hatching rate by egg removal. However, long-term consequences of this management me...

Dans le cadre de l'Année de la biodiversité, des jeunes chercheurs issus du CNRS et des laboratoires de l'Institut écologie et environnement (INEE) ont pris l'initiative d'écrire un ouvrage destiné au grand public sur la biodiversité. Préfacé par Yves Coppens, ce livre illustré traite des aspects les plus inattendus de la biodiversité et nous inter...