Aurélie Coulon

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle

La Cistude d’Europe (Emys orbicularis) est une tortue d’eau douce protégée sur l’ensemble du territoire français et faisant l’objet d’un Plan National d’Actions (PNA). Dans le but de mieux comprendre son utilisation de l’espace, des individus ont été équipés de balises GPS au printemps 2023 sur deux sites méditerranéens : le marais de Tartuguière (...

Context-dependent dispersal allows organisms to seek and settle in habitats improving their fitness. Despite the importance of species interactions in determining fitness, a quantitative synthesis of how they affect dispersal is lacking. We present a meta-analysis asking (i) whether the interaction experienced and/or perceived by a focal species (d...

Aim Seasonal migrations, such as those of ungulates, are particularly threatened by habitat transformations and fragmentation, climate and other environmental changes caused by anthropogenic activities. Mountain ungulate migrations are neglected because they are relatively short, although traversing heterogeneous altitudinal gradients particularly...

Background Linear transportation infrastructures (roads, railways, oil and gas pipelines, powerlines and waterways) are recognized as important contributors to the fragmentation of species habitats. On the other hand, verges of linear transportation infrastructures (road and railway embankments, strips of grass under power lines or above buried pip...

Résultats préliminaires d'un suivi GPS de la Cistude d'Europe dans un marais de l'Hérault, France

In variable environments, habitats that are rich in resources often carry a higher risk of predation. As a result, natural selection should favour individuals that balance allocation of time to foraging versus avoiding predation through an optimal decision-making process that maximizes fitness. The behavioural trade-off between resource acquisition...

The behavioural trade-off between foraging and risk avoidance is expected to be particularly acute during gestation and lactation, when the energetic demands of reproduction peak. We investigated how female roe deer, an income breeding ungulate, adjust their management of this trade-off during the birth period in terms of foraging activity and habi...

Accelerometery is revolutionising the field of behavioural ecology through its capacity to detect the fine-scale movements of animals resulting from their behaviour. Because it is often difficult to infer the behaviour of wildlife on a continuous basis, particularly for cryptic species, accelerometers potentially provide powerful tools for remote m...

Seasonal migrations are central ecological processes connecting populations, species and ecosystems in time and space. Land migrations, such as those of ungulates, are particularly threatened by habitat transformations and fragmentation, climate change and other environmental changes caused by anthropogenic activities. Mountain ungulate migrations...

Kazakh herders of the Mongolian Altai practice a form of nomadism char-acterised by high altitudinal amplitude and more frequent movements than in other regions of Mongolia. This paper proposes a local scale study of nomadic practices using an original multidisciplinary methodological ap-proach combining anthropological surveys and several years’ G...

Roads impact bat populations through habitat loss and collisions. High quality habitats particularly increase bat mortalities on roads, yet many questions remain concerning how local landscape features may influence bat behaviour and lead to high collision risks (e.g. influence of distance to trees, or of vegetation density). When comparing the pot...

Aim Animal movement determines home range patterns, which in turn affect individual fitness, population dynamics and ecosystem functioning. Using temperate bats, a group of particular conservation concern, we investigated how morphological traits, habitat specialization and environmental variables affect home range sizes and daily foraging movement...

Metapopulation models are useful and necessary decision-making tools to better integrate biodiversity in different projects in order to slow its decline. However, their realism is rarely estimated, and with metrics that are not always adapted. Concurrently, landscape genetics seeks to understand the functioning of metapopulations by analysing genet...

Context The natural patchiness of wetlands and flooding events are likely to strongly affect the genetic structure of their terrestrial species. However, these effects are not well understood yet, especially for small mammals. Objectives We investigated at different spatial scales the genetic structure of the harvest mouse (Micromys minutus), a th...

Identifying the isotopic signatures of vertical mobility and alpine meadows exploitation in the teeth of domesticated animals can be a key to understanding the subsistence strategies used by pastoral communities through history. Indeed, the oxygen (δ¹⁸O) and carbon (δ¹³C) isotopic composition of sequentially sampled tooth enamel, used alone or in c...

Evolution should favour plasticity in dispersal decisions in response to spatial heterogeneity in social and environmental contexts. Sex differences in individual optimization of dispersal decisions are poorly documented in mammals, because species where both sexes commonly disperse are rare. To elucidate the sex-specific drivers governing dispersa...

Strontium isotopic analysis of sequentially formed tissues, such as tooth enamel, is commonly used to study provenance and mobility of humans and animals. However, the potential of ⁸⁷ Sr/ ⁸⁶ Sr in tooth enamel to track high-frequency movements has not yet been established, in part due to the lack of data on modern animals of known movement and pred...

Face to the global reinforcement of environmental regulation within the EU to achieve the biodiversity “No Net Loss” (NNL) goal, environmental assessment (EA) has to estimate actual impacts of projects on species metapopulation functionning at larger and larger spatial scales and with more and more accurate and realistics evaluations of this functi...

The horse, as a domestic animal, had a strong impact on the organisation of ancient societies of the eastern steppes of Eurasia by enabling people to move faster and transport goods and people more efficiently. This newfound mobility was accompanied by profound changes in the expression of ritual practices, and horses are repeatedly found in funera...

The assessment of the date of death (DOD) of animals found in archaeological sites provides insights into the exploitation of their environment by ancient mobile and sedentary populations. In an attempt to overcome the limitations of the traditional methods, we determine the DOD of domestic caprines using sequential oxygen isotope analysis of devel...

Roads impact bat populations through habitat loss and collisions. High quality habitats particularly increase bat mortalities at roads, yet many questions remain concerning how local landscape features may influence bat behaviour and lead to high collision risks. Moreover, no study provides an understanding of the extent to which mortalities result...

Background Linear transportation infrastructures (roads, railways, oil and gas pipelines, powerlines and waterways) generate well documented fragmenting effects on species habitats. However, the potential of verges of linear transportation infrastructures (road and railway embankments, strips of grass under power lines or above buried pipelines, or...

Context Collisions with wind turbines threaten bat populations worldwide. Previous studies tried to assess the effects of landscape on mortalities. Yet, the count of carcasses found per species is low, leading to a low statistical power. Acoustic surveys collect large datasets (proxy for bat density); however, if bat vertical distribution is not ac...

L’UMS PatriNat mène depuis 2015 - avec l’aide de différents partenaires - une revue systématique (synthèse bibliographique) sur le rôle des dépendances d’infrastructures de transport pour la biodiversité (projet COHNECS-IT). Dans le cadre de cette revue systématique une grille d’analyse a été construite afin d’étudier la robustesse des protocoles e...

Dispersal is a key mechanism enabling species to adjust their geographic range to rapid global change. However, dispersal is costly and environmental modifications are likely to modify the cost–benefit balance of individual dispersal decisions, for example, by decreasing functional connectivity. Dispersal costs occur during departure, transience an...

Although inter‐individual heterogeneity in many aspects of dispersal behaviour is widely reported, this key life‐history trait is predominantly modelled as a dichotomous state of philopatry versus dispersal. The increasing body of evidence for dispersal syndromes (i.e. a suite of correlated morphological, behavioural, and life‐history traits associ...

Background: Selecting high-quality habitat and the optimal time to reproduce can increase individual fitness and is a strong evolutionary factor shaping animal populations. However, few studies have investigated the interplay between land cover heterogeneity, limitation in food resources, individual quality and spatial variation in fitness paramet...

Small-bodied vertebrates sometimes evolve gigantism on islands, but there is a lack of consistent association with ecological factors or island characteristics. One possible reason is that, even if the ecological conditions are right, body size might fail to diverge on islands that were isolated recently or if there is gene flow between islands and...

Rationale Carbon and nitrogen stable isotope time series performed in continuously growing tissues (hair, tooth enamel) are commonly used to reconstruct the dietary history of modern and ancient animals. Predicting the effects of altitudinal mobility on animal δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N values remains difficult as several variables such as temperature, water av...

Small-bodied vertebrates sometimes evolve gigantism on islands, but there is a lack of consistent association with ecological factors or island characteristics. One possible reason is that, even if the ecological conditions are right, body size might fail to diverge on islands that were isolated recently or if there is gene flow between islands and...

The use of echolocation allows insectivorous bats to access unique foraging niches by locating obstacles and prey with ultrasounds in complete darkness. To avoid interspecific competition, it is likely that sonar features and wing morphology co-evolved with species vertical distribution, but due to the technical difficulties of studying flight in t...

Background The role of linear transportation infrastructures (roads, railways, oil and gas pipelines, power lines, rivers and canals) in fragmenting natural habitats is fully acknowledged. Up to now, the potential of linear transportation infrastructures verges (road and railway embankments, strips of grass under power lines or above buried pipelin...

Link : http://www.strategie.gouv.fr/sites/strategie.gouv.fr/files/atoms/files/180226_-_sordello_et_al_revues_syst_france_strategie.pdf

Appendix S1. Methods. Table S1. Examples of heritability (h 2) estimates in the reviewed studies. Table S2. Models of dispersal evolution and assumptions made on the genetic architecture of the evolving traits.

Bat fatalities by collision or barotrauma at wind farms currently raise high conservation concerns. In many countries, pre-installation acoustic surveys are mandatory in order to assess the impacts of wind farm projects. In this purpose, the use of wind masts to estimate bat activity and hence predict collision risk is highly recommended by conserv...

Dispersal is a process of central importance for the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of populations and communities, because of its diverse consequences for gene flow and demography. It is subject to evolutionary change, which begs the question, what is the genetic basis of this potentially complex trait? To address this question, we (i) revie...

Methodological considerations after the Systematic Literature Review of the COHNECS-IT research project on biodiversity form the transport infrastructure verges

The thermal performance curve (TPC) illustrates the dependence on body- and therefore environmental- temperature of many fitness-related aspects of ectotherm ecology and biology including foraging, growth, predator avoidance, and reproduction. The typical thermal performance curve model is linear in its parameters despite the well-known, strong, no...

Sex-biased natal dispersal is widespread, and its significance remains a central question in evolutionary biology. However, theory so far fails to predict some of the most common patterns found in nature. To address this, we present novel results from an individual-based model investigating the joint roles of inbreeding load, demographic stochastic...

Background: The role of linear transportation infrastructures (roads, railways, oil and gas pipelines, power lines, rivers and canals) in fragmenting natural habitats has been demonstrated. Yet, the potential of habitat or corridor of their verges (road and railway embankments, strips of grass under power lines or above buried pipelines, or waterwa...

Asymmetric dispersal within and between populations is more often the norm than the exception. For example, prevailing winds and currents can result in directional dispersal of many passively dispersed species and inter-individual variability in physical condition can generate asymmetric dispersal rates between individuals and populations. Despite...

Conservation actions often focus on restoration or creation of natural areas designed to facilitate the movements of organisms among populations. To be efficient, these actions need to be based on reliable estimates or predictions of landscape connectivity. While circuit theory and least-cost paths (LCPs) are increasingly being used to estimate con...

The freshwater blenny (Salaria fluviatilis), an endemic fish to the tributaries of the Mediterranean and Black seas, is considered endangered in five of the nine Mediterranean-European countries. Substantial effort has recently been made to improve our understanding of its biology (i.e., habitat modelling, morphology, behaviour), but developing a c...

Reptile sheltering behaviour, despite profound life history ramifications, remains poorly investigated. Whether or not individuals share a suitable shelter or, conversely, exclude conspecifics may depend on associated costs (resource partitioning, sexual harassment, disease or parasite contamination) and benefits (predation risk dilution, thermal r...

When individuals disperse, they modify the physical and social composition of their reproductive environment, potentially impacting their fitness. The choice an individual makes between dispersal and philopatry is thus critical, hence a better understanding of the mechanisms involved in the decision to leave the natal area is crucial. We explored h...

Background/Question/Methods It is now well established that species will need to shift their ranges in response to climate change, but, for many species, their ability to relocate may be prevented or substantially restricted by habitat fragmentation. Mitigating action by governmental and conservation organizations has the potential to alleviate t...

The importance of landscape connectivity in determining biodiversity outcomes under environmental change has led to indices of connectivity becoming amongst the most widely used measures in conservation. Thus, it is vital that our understanding of connectivity and our use of indices describing it are reliable. Dispersal is the key ecological proces...

Land conversion is one of the major global changes that threaten population viability. As with many industrial activities, quarrying highly modifies land cover, destroying previous habitats but also creating new conditions potentially supporting functioning and connectivity of pioneer species. Using a multi-landscape and -temporal approach, we asse...

Developing conservation strategies for migratory fishes requires an understanding of connectivity among populations. Neotropical rivers contain diverse and economically important assemblages of migratory fishes, but little is known about the population biology of most species. We examined the population structure of Prochilodus mariae, an abundant...

Natal dispersal (i.e. movements between the natal range of an individual and its first breeding site) is a complex process which can have profound impacts on population dynamics. In most species, only a proportion of juveniles actually disperse, but few empirical data are available on the factors that drive the decision to disperse. To understand t...

Many organisms use cues to decide whether to disperse or not, especially those related to the composition of their environment. Dispersal hence sometimes depends on population density, which can be important for the dynamics and evolution of sub-divided populations. But very little is known about the factors that organisms use to inform their dispe...

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This article documents the addition of 139 microsatellite marker loci and 90 pairs of single-nucleotide polymorphism sequencing primers to the Molecular Ecology Resources Database. Loci were developed for the following species: Aglaoctenus lagotis, Costus pulverulentus, Costus scaber, Culex pipiens, Dascyllus marginatus, Lupinus nanus Benth, Phloeo...

This article documents the addition of 139 microsatellite marker loci and 90 pairs of single-nucleotide polymorphism sequencing primers to the Molecular Ecology Resources Database. Loci were developed for the following species: Aglaoctenus lagotis, Costus pulverulentus, Costus scaber, Culex pipiens, Dascyllus marginatus, Lupinus nanus Benth, Phloeo...

Habitat gap size has been negatively linked to movement probability in several species occupying fragmented landscapes. How these effects on movement behaviour in turn affect the genetic structure of fragmented populations at local scales is less well known. We tested, and confirmed, the hypothesis that genetic differentiation among adjacent popula...

Alteration in anti-predatory behaviour following geographic isolation has been observed in a number of taxa. Such alteration was attributed to the effect of relaxed selection in the novel environment, reinforced by the cost of anti-predatory behaviours. We studied aspects of anti-snake behaviour in 987 adult and juvenile wall lizards Podarcis mural...

Dispersal costs can be classified into energetic, time, risk and opportunity costs and may be levied directly or deferred during departure, transfer and settlement. They may equally be incurred during life stages before the actual dispersal event through investments in special morphologies. Because costs will eventually determine the performance of...

Anthropogenic environmental changes, including overfishing, hydrologic alteration, and habitat degradation, pose substantial threats to riverine fish populations and their migration routes. Neotropical rivers contain a diverse assemblage of economically important migratory fishes, but relatively little is known about their population biology compar...

1. Estimating and improving landscape connectivity has become a key topic in conservation biology. While a range of connectivity indices exist and are widely used to inform spatial planning, they have potentially serious limitations. 2. We introduce a new method for modelling animals moving between habitat patches across a heterogeneous matrix. Our...

Spatial auto-correlograms of three different estimators in relation to distance. Spatial auto-correlograms for females (red lines) and males (blue lines) are represented for different estimators: Moran's I (A), Queller and Goodnight (B) and Lynch and Ritland (C). Error bars represent the standard error around the estimated genetic correlation coeff...

Data on spatial genetic patterns may provide information about the ecological and behavioural mechanisms underlying population structure. Indeed, social organization and dispersal patterns of species may be reflected by the pattern of genetic structure within a population. We investigated the fine-scale spatial genetic structure of a roe deer (Capr...

Studies comparing dispersal in fragmented versus unfragmented landscapes show that habitat fragmentation alters the dispersal behavior of many species. We used two complementary approaches to explore Florida Scrub-Jay (Aphelocoma coerulescens) dispersal in relation to landscape fragmentation. First, we compared dispersal distances of color-marked i...

genhet is an R function which calculates the five most used estimates of individual heterozygosity. The advantage of this program is that it can be applied to any diploid genotype dataset, without any limitation in the number of individuals, loci or alleles. Its detailed manual should allow people who have never used R before to make the function w...

The symposium and workshop 'Organisms on the move: ecology and evolution of dispersal', held in Ghent (Belgium), 14-18 September 2009, brought together a wide range of researchers using empirical and modelling approaches to examine the dispersal process. This meeting provided an opportunity to assess how much cross-fertilization there has been betw...

The joint analysis of spatial and genetic data is rapidly becoming the norm in population genetics. More and more studies explicitly describe and quantify the spatial organization of genetic variation and try to relate it to underlying ecological processes. As it has become increasingly difficult to keep abreast with the latest methodological devel...

Understanding how genetic variation in the Tree Swallow (Tachycineta bicolor) is geographically structured is informative because this broadly distributed North American bird is increasingly used as a model for studies of mating systems, life-history traits, and physiology. We explored patterns of phylogeographic differentiation across the Tree Swa...

Landscape genetics is an emerging interdisciplinary field that combines methods and concepts from population genetics, landscape ecology, and spatial statistics. The interest in landscape genetics is steadily increasing, and the field is evolving rapidly. We here outline four major challenges for future landscape genetic research that were identifi...

We explored the effects of recent forest fragmentation on fine-scale patterns of population structuring and genetic diversity in populations of White-ruffed Manakins (Corapipo altera) inhabiting premontane forest fragments of varying size in southwestern Costa Rica. Habitat fragmentation is a major conservation concern for avian populations worldwi...

It is commonly assumed that the propensity to disperse and the dispersal distance of mammals should increase with increasing density and be greater among males than among females. However, most empirical evidence, especially on large mammals, has focused on highly polygynous and dimorphic species displaying female-defence mating tactics. We tested...

The delimitation of populations, defined as groups of individuals linked by gene flow, is possible by the analysis of genetic markers and also by spatial models based on dispersal probabilities across a landscape. We combined these two complimentary methods to define the spatial pattern of genetic structure among remaining populations of the threat...

In this study, we sought to understand how landscape structure affects roe deer movements within their home-range in a heterogeneous and fragmented agricultural system of south-western France. We analysed the movements of 20 roe deer fitted with GPS collars which recorded their locations every 2–6h over several months (mean=9months). Based on empir...

Natal dispersal is a three-phase process: the decision to leave the natal range, the search phase and finally the settlement phase. Not much is known about the search phase in large herbivores. We quantified the search behaviour of young roe deer from two contrasting populations, using different measures: search area, search rate, search intensity...

N. 2007: Using radio-track-ing and direct observation to estimate roe deer Capreolus capreolus den-sity in a fragmented landscape: a pilot study. -Wildl. Biol. 13: 313-320. In this pilot study, we estimate roe deer Capreolus capreolus density in a fragmented landscape, using radio-tracking and direct observation in a Pe-tersen-Lincoln framework wit...

To determine the spatial resolution of Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver data, rigorous testing is essential. We tested performance of the Lotek 3300 GPS collar for medium-sized mammals (Lotek Engineering, Inc., Newmarket, ON, Canada). To mimic real wildlife monitoring situations, we performed both static (stationary receiver) and mobile tes...

A crucial question in wildlife management concerns the definition of ecologically meaningful management units. Management action needs to be co‐ordinated at the appropriate spatial scale. There are few practical tools for delimiting pertinent management units for large mammals such as ungulates. Previous work has favoured a molecular approach to de...