Claire Jacquet

Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution Montpellier (ISEM)

Understanding the capacity of ecological systems to withstand and recover from disturbances is a major challenge for ecological research in the context of environmental changes. Past research has mostly focused on the local effects of disturbances on biodiversity recovery, while alterations of inter-patch connectivity induced by disturbances have r...

The meta-ecosystem concept provides a theoretical framework to study the effect of local and regional flows of resources on ecosystem dynamics. Meta-ecosystem theory has hitherto been applied to highly abstract landscapes, and meta-ecosystem dynamics in real-world landscapes remain largely unexplored. River networks constitute a prime example of me...

MacArthur and Wilson's theory of island biogeography has been a foundation for obtaining testable predictions from models of community assembly and for developing models that integrate across scales and disciplines. Historically, however, these developments have focused on integration across ecological and macroevolutionary scales and on predicting...

Global ecosystems are facing a deepening biodiversity crisis, necessitating robust approaches to quantifying species extinction risk. The lower limit of the macroecological relationship between species range and body size has long been hypothesized as an estimate of the relationship between the minimum viable range size (MVRS) needed for species pe...

Ecological pyramids represent the distribution of abundance and biomass of living organisms across body‐sizes. Our understanding of their expected shape relies on the assumption of invariant steady‐state conditions. However, most of the world’s ecosystems experience disturbances that keep them far from such a steady state. Here, using the allometri...

Understanding the capacity of ecological systems to withstand and recover from disturbances is a major challenge for ecological research in the context of environmental change. Disturbances have multi-scale effects: they can cause species extinctions locally and alter connectivity between habitat patches at the metacommunity level. Yet, our underst...

Ecological stability refers to a family of concepts used to describe how systems of interacting species vary through time and respond to disturbances. Because observed ecological stability depends on sampling scales and environmental context, it is notoriously difficult to compare measurements across sites and systems. Here, we apply stochastic dyn...

Spatial flow of material and resources is a central process structuring ecological communities. The meta-ecosystem concept provides a theoretical framework to study the interplay between local and regional flows of resources and their implications for ecosystem dynamics and functioning. Yet, meta-ecosystem theory has been applied to highly simplifi...

Dendritic habitats, such as river ecosystems, promote the persistence of species by favouring spatial asynchronous dynamics among branches. Yet, our understanding of how network topology influences metapopulation synchrony in these ecosystems remains limited. Here, we introduce the concept of fluvial synchrogram to formulate and test expectations r...

Motivation: We compiled a global database of long-term riverine fish surveys from 46 regional and national monitoring programmes and from individual academic research efforts, with which numerous basic and applied questions in ecology and global change research can be explored. Such spatially and temporally extensive datasets have been lacking for...

Current global change is associated with an increase in disturbance frequency and intensity, with the potential to trigger population collapses and to cause permanent transitions to new ecosystem states. However, our understanding of ecosystem responses to disturbances is still incomplete. Specifically, there is a mismatch between the diversity of...

Despite the increasing ubiquity of biological invasions worldwide, little is known about the scale‐dependent effects of nonnative species on real‐world ecological dynamics. Here, using an extensive time series dataset of riverine fish communities across different biogeographic regions of the world, we assessed the effects of nonnative species on th...

Scientists, policy makers, and journalists are three key, interconnected players involved in prioritizing and implementing solutions to mitigate the consequences of anthropogenic pressures on the environment. The way in which information is framed and expertise is communicated by the media is crucial for political decisions and for the integrated m...

In past and present ecosystems, trophic interactions determine material and energy transfers among species, regulating population dynamics and community stability. Food web studies in past ecosystems are helpful to assess the persistence of ecosystem structure throughout geological times and to explore the existence of general principles of food we...

The Theory of Island Biogeography (TIB) predicts how area and isolation influence species richness equilibrium on insular habitats. However, the TIB remains silent about functional trait composition and provides no information on the scaling of functional diversity with area, an observation that is now documented in many systems. To fill this gap,...

To understand why and how species invade ecosystems, ecologists have made heavy use of observations of species colonization on islands. The theory of island biogeography, developed in the 1960s by R.H. MacArthur and E.O. Wilson, has had a tremendous impact on how ecologists understand the link between species diversity and characteristics of the ha...

Since the mid-20th century, climate change and biodiversity loss have been identified as major consequences of anthropological pressures and both have already transgressed safe limits. Given their significance for human health and well-being and their large-scale effects, international cooperation is crucial to address these issues. Intergovernment...

Understanding the mechanisms responsible for stability and persistence of ecosystems is one of the greatest challenges in ecology. Robert May showed that, contrary to intuition, complex randomly built ecosystems are less likely to be stable than simpler ones. Few attempts have been tried to test May's prediction empirically, and we still ignore wha...

The Theory of Island Biogeography (TIB) predicts how area and isolation, through colonization and extinction dynamics, influence the equilibrium species richness on insular habitats, such as ponds, forest fragments or coral reefs. However, the TIB remains silent about the body-size distribution within species assemblages, a determinant aspect of co...

Global changes induce deep modifications in species distribution worldwide. However, the consequences of such changes on community structure are still poorly understood. Here, we propose a new framework, coupling species distribution and trophic models, to predict global change impacts on food-web structure. We first present a new method, inspired...

We performed a stability analysis of 119 quantitative food webs which were compiled using a standard methodology to build Ecopath mass-balance models. Our analysis reveals that classic descriptors of complexity do not affect stability in natural food webs. Food web structure, which is non-random in real communities, reflects another form of complex...