Couvet Denis

Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle

Une meilleure gestion des écosystèmes pourrait contribuer à une atténuation significative du changement climatique. Pour y parvenir un certain nombre de conditions doivent être réunies : préserver et restaurer la diversité biologique de ces écosystèmes, y compris celle des communautés animales et microbiennes ; faciliter l’adaptation de ces écosyst...

We examine how ecological sciences have completed the idea of ecosystem balance with notions of steady-state regime, tipping-points and ecosystem transformation. In this context, it is possible to propose a notion of ecosystem integrity that includes diversity of the compositions, structures and functions of the ecosystem, and as such could be cons...

article collectif de 740 scientifiques sur la politique agricole commune (PAC) comme tribune dans le journal Le Monde du 3 mai 2021 Le gouvernement est sur le point de définir la déclinaison nationale de la politique agricole commune (PAC) qui scellera le futur de l’agriculture française à l’horizon 2030. Ses propositions seront débattues les 4 et...

Protecting nature has become a global concern. However, the very idea of nature is problematic. We examined the etymological and semantic diversity of the word used to translate nature in a conservation context in 76 of the primary languages of the world to identify the different relationships between humankind and nature. Surprisingly, the number...

The multiplicity and diversity of entities and processes involved in major transitions require narrative choices to make these transitions intelligible, requiring concepts that combine human and non-human agentivities. The notion of mediant, or “transhuman assemblages of vital materiality”, could be at the heart of the narratives of major transitio...

In a dataset on 83 countries covering the years 1960–2009, we find a negative indirect effect of the share of renewable natural capital in wealth on economic growth transmitted through demographic factors, more specifically, population fertility. In contrast, in countries with lower income inequality and higher institutional quality, the share of n...

The idea of ‘nature’ is at the very core of science, considered as its flagship and deepest link with human societies. However, while nature preservation has become a major social concern, the idea of nature remains elusive. We examine here the origins, etymology, and historical semantics of this word and its different meanings in contemporary Euro...

A new geological epoch has begun—the Anthropocene. Huge anthropogenic transformations of terrestrial landscapes over the past five decades have forced its declaration. Exploring of interaction of humans with nature in general, and with landscapes in particular, can be characterised properly by the terms ‘landscape research’ and ‘landscape science’....

Biodiversity governance requires relevant biodiversity data and interpretation, policy proposals. Essential Biodiversity Variables are a major concept to identify priorities in regards to these data, how to organize and relate the different kind of biodiversity data. A major type of biodiversity variables to develop to examine and improve human–bio...

Feeding 9 billion people by 2050 on one hand, and preserving biodiversity on the other hand, are two shared policy goals at the global level. Yet while these goals are clear, they are to some extent in conflict, because agriculture is a major cause of biodiversity loss, and the path to achieve both of them is at the heart of a public controversy ar...

The intensification of agriculture is one of the main causes of biodiversity loss. We model the interdependent relationship between agriculture and wild biodiversity providing regulating services to agriculture on farmed land. We suppose that while agriculture has a negative impact on wild biodiversity, the latter can increase agricultural producti...

Article impact statement: New collaborations with accounting research can improve conservation impact of ecosystem‐based information systems.

The Green Revolution and the introduction of chemical fertilizers, synthetic pesticides and high yield crops had enabled to increase food production in the mid and late 20th. The benefits of this agricultural intensification have however reached their limits since yields are no longer increasing for many crops, negative externalities on the environ...

The Green Revolution and the introduction of chemical fertilizers, synthetic pesticides and high yield crops had enabled to increase food production in the mid and late 20th. The benefits of this agricultural intensification have however reached their limits since yields are no longer increasing for many crops, negative externalities on the environ...

The Green Revolution and the introduction of chemical fertilizers, synthetic pesticides and high yield crops had enabled to increase food production in the mid and late 20th. The benefits of this agricultural intensification have however reached their limits since yields are no longer increasing for many crops, negative externalities on the environ...

La notion de solution fondée sur la nature (SFN) a été proposée par une ONG environnementale, l’UICN. Il s’agit de mettre la nature, ses propriétés, au cœur de la réflexion autour du développement des techniques, des attentes humaines : il s'agit de techniques intégrant autant que possible les valeurs et propriétés de la nature. L’idée majeure est...

Humans are changing the biosphere by exerting pressure on land via different land uses with variable intensities. Quantifying the relative importance of the land-use composition and intensity for communities may provide valuable insights for understanding community dynamics in human-dominated landscapes. Here, we evaluate the relative importance of...

In this paper, we model the supply and demand for agricultural goods and assess and compare how welfare, land use, and biodiversity are affected under intensive and extensive farming systems at market equilibrium instead of at exogenous production levels. As long as demand is responsive to price, and intensive farming has lower production costs, th...

Data produced by biodiversity research projects that evaluate and monitor Good Environmental Status have a high potential for use by stakeholders involved in [marine] environmental management. The lack of specific scientific objectives, poor organizational logic, and a characteristically disorganized collection of information leads to a decentraliz...

In their work, Caballero et al. (2016) assess the efficiency of circular sib mating (CM) for the genetic management of captive populations. They argue that if one adopts findings on wild populations suggesting that the number of lethal equivalents per genome (B) are at least six, CM performs poorly, and ‘should be avoided because it would lead to u...

The field of biodiversity conservation has recently been criticised as relying on a fixist view of the living world, in which existing species constitute the targets of conservation efforts and simultaneously static states of reference, which is in apparent disagreement with evolutionary dynamics. Here, we argue that the ethical and theoretical fra...

Les humains s’approprient une partie significative de la biomasse produite annuellement par les écosystèmes, 40 % pour les Ouest-Européens, la moyenne mondiale étant de l’ordre de 25 %. Cette appropriation se fait sous trois formes ; la récolte de biomasse – dont une partie est consommée directement –, la production de résidus non récoltés, et la p...

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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...

Reconciliation ecology aims to preserve ordinary biodiversity through integration of ecology and social values. We define such biodiversity as an alternative to species and site specific conservation approaches, demonstrating its analytical power to understand the dynamics of biodiversity changes, its consequences, in particular in regards to the f...

We show that whether intensive or extensive farming is most beneficial to biodiversity depends on the equilibrium of agricultural markets. With higher production costs, extensive farming tends to be more beneficial to biodiversity than intensive farming, except when there is a very high degree of convexity between biodiversity and yield. Extensive...

Although ex situ conservation is indispensable for thousands of species, captive breeding is associated with negative genetic changes: loss of genetic variance and genetic adaptation to captivity that is deleterious in the wild. We used quantitative genetic individual-based simulations to model the effect of genetic management on the evolution of a...

A travers la problématique des ressources, ce travail questionne la finalité des activités économiques et des modes de production. Il propose une démarche socio-environnementale intégrée et pluri-disciplinaire pour, à travers les droits et les devoirs de l’homme, (1) préserver les fonctions et les services écosystémiques, (2) satisfaire aux besoins...

We examine the relevance of the notion of “ordinary biodiversity”, in complementarities with the notion of “threatened species”, in regards to the ethics of conservation biology. The notion leads to emphasize two objectives of conservation biology, the maintenance of the ecosystems ecological complexity and of the evolutionary potential of biologic...

Chapitre de l’ouvrage collectif Penser une démocratie alimentaire Volume II – Proposition Lascaux entre ressources naturelles et besoins fondamentaux, F. Collart Dutilleul et T. Bréger (dir), Inida, San José, 2014, pp. 375-383

A travers la problématique des ressources, ce travail questionne la finalité des activités économiques et des modes de production. Il propose une démarche socio-environnementale intégrée et pluri-disciplinaire pour, à travers les droits et les devoirs de l’homme, (1) préserver les fonctions et les services écosystémiques, (2) satisfaire aux besoins...

Les sciences participatives contribuent largement aux progrès des recherches sur l’environnement et la biodiversité. Elles peuvent être distinguées selon leur objectif, révélant des logiques complémentaires. Les recherches de type « exploratoire », entreprises dans un objectif de connaissances, sont de manière générale initiées et pilotées par des...

Today's biodiversity crisis concerns both rare species, including species at risk of imminent extinction, and common species (Hoffmann et al. 2010; Powell et al. 2013). Common species are far from being above threats.

Biodiversity offsets are intended to achieve no net loss of biodiversity due to economic and human development. A variety of biodiversity components are addressed by offset policies. It is required that loss of protected species due to development be offset under the EU Habitats and Birds Directives in Europe. We call this type of offset a species-...

Les compensations d’impacts sur la biodiversité reposent sur une équivalence écologique entre les pertes dues aux projets d’aménagements et les gains attendus par les mesures compensatoires. À partir de l’analyse de quatre-vingt-cinq dossiers de dérogations à la destruction d’espèces protégées, les auteurs ont identifié plusieurs limites dans l’éva...

Nous montrons que la forme d’agriculture la plus intéressante pour la biodiversité dépend de l’équilibre des marchés agricoles. Toutes choses égales par ailleurs, tant que la demande réagit aux prix et que l’agriculture extensive a des coûts de production plus élevés, cette dernière est souvent plus intéressante pour la biodiversité que l’agricultu...

Participatory sciences contribute significantly to the progress of research on the environment and biodiversity. They can be distinguished according to their objective, revealing complementary logic. "Exploratory" researches, which objective is to produce knowledge, are generally initiated and driven by research laboratories. "Transformative" resea...

Une grande question fait débat, aussi bien d’un point de vue scientifique, que politique, ou encore sociétal : vaut-il mieux une agriculture intensive, qui laisse plus d’espaces disponibles pour des milieux naturels et pour la biodiversité, ou une agriculture extensive, consommatrice d’espaces mais favorisant la biodiversité sur ceux qu’elle consom...

Volunteer-based standardized monitoring of birds has been widely implemented in Europe and North America. In France, a breeding bird survey is running since 1989 and offers keen birdwatchers to count spring birds annually during 5 min exactly on 10 fix points within a randomly selected square. The first goal of such breeding bird surveys is to meas...

Un large éventail d’indicateurs de biodiversité permet de construire et d’évaluer les politiques publiques et de sensibiliser les différents publics. En complément apparaît la nécessité de disposer d’indicateurs évaluant l’impact de chaque acteur, qui soient robustes et déclinables à une échelle locale. Couplée à des indicateurs de pression locale...

Commentaire sur le Rapport du Club des juristes « Mieux réparer le dommage environnemental ». Dans son rapport « Mieux réparer le dommage environnemental », le Club des juristes émet un certain nombre de propositions et la première d'entre elles, avancée dans la partie préliminaire du rapport « Primauté de la prévention : vers une obligation de vig...

Formulae were derived for the genetic differentiation between populations within a metapopulation (F SM ), and between metapopulations (F MT ) as functions of migration and mutation rates, size and number of populations and metapopulations. We show that F MT = 1/(1 + 4 N e m), where N e is the effective size of a metapopulation, and where the...

Downey (2010) documents the dynamical properties of labor-exchange networks that would maintain resilience of swidden agriculture in Belize. A significant event revealing such resilience was a migration cascade between villages because an individual intended to privately run, rather than collectively, a diesel-powered corn mill. The village concern...

Human activities are expected to result in a diversity of directional or stochastic constraints that affect species either directly or by indirectly impacting their resources. However, there is no theoretical framework to predict the complex and various effects of these constraints on ecological communities. We developed a dynamic model that mimics...

To develop a complete and informative biodiversity observation system, it is necessary to compare the strengths and limits of various monitoring schemes. In this article, we examine the various advantages of extensively monitoring fine-grained spatial variations of biodiversity, where the prominent traits of many species within a community (abundan...

La science participative peut être définie comme la collaboration entre une équipe de chercheurs et un vaste réseau d’observateurs ou d’expérimentateurs bénévoles, oeuvrant sur des thématiques de recherche variées. Dotée de multiples atouts - son mode de fonctionnement collaboratif, la puissance numérique de ses analyses, la pertinence sociale de s...

We performed computer simulations to evaluate the effectiveness of circular mating as a genetic management option for captive populations. As a benchmark, we used the method proposed by Fernández and Caballero according to which parental contributions are set to produce minimum coancestry among the offspring and matings are performed so as to minim...

Theoretical models have shown that the maintenance of high frequencies of females in gynodioecious species can be explained by the spatial structure of cytoplasmic and nuclear genes involved in sex determination. Whereas spatial structure of cytoplasmic factors which cause male-sterility has been studied in several taxa, that of nuclear factors tha...

Background / Purpose: Human activities are expected to result in a diversity of directional or stochastic disturbances, affecting species either directly or through an effect on their resources. Yet there is no theoretical framework to predict the complex and various effects of these disturbances on communities.We developed a dynamic model that m...

According to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), states have to provide indicators in order to assess the performance of their initiatives for halting the loss of biodiversity. Sixteen headline indicators have been identified for monitoring the CBD targets. Of these indicators only one, "Trends in the abundance and distribution of selecte...

Temperate species are projected to experience the greatest temperature increases across a range of modelled climate change scenarios, and climate warming has been linked to geographical range and population changes of individual species at such latitudes. However, beyond the multiple modelling approaches, we lack empirical evidence of contemporary...

Synthesis (0.04 MB DOC)