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43
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
March 2016 - present
October 2012 - October 2015
October 2012 - October 2015
Publications
Publications (43)
Aim: How grasslands productivity varies with its temporal stability is crucial to monitor and manage these ecosystems. However, identifying the direction of the productivity-stability relationship remains challenging because ecological stability has multiple components that can display neutral, positive or negative covariations. Furthermore, eviden...
The selection of new crops and the migration of crop areas are two key strategies for agriculture to cope with climate change and ensure food security in the coming years. However, both rely on the assumption that climate is a major factor determining crop distributions worldwide. Here, we show that the current global distributions of nine of twelv...
Ensuring the temporal stability of national food production is crucial for avoiding sharp drops in domestic food availability. The average stability of individual crop yields and asynchrony among crop yield fluctuations are two candidate mechanisms to stabilize national food production. However, the quantification of their respective influence on t...
Homogenization of crop portfolios from the field to the global scale is raising concerns about agricultural adaptation to climate change. Assessing whether such trends threaten farmers’ long-term adaptive capacity requires a thorough understanding of changes in their crop portfolios, identification of the drivers of change, and the implications suc...
Droughts can have strong environmental and socioeconomic impacts in the Mediterranean region, in particular for countries relying on rain-fed agricultural production, but also in areas in which irrigation plays an important role and in which natural vegetation has been modified or is subject to water stress. The purpose of this review is to provide...
Humanity places a heavy burden on agricultural landscapes, demanding plentiful food,
multiple ecosystem functions, and biodiversity conservation. We quantified areas
growing ‘brighter’ and ‘darker’ (i.e., better or worse than expected based on extrinsic
constraints) for multifunctionality of ecosystem services (ES) over time across a
dynamic agricu...
Les « diversités cultivées » présentes dans les systèmes agricoles se déclinent à de multiples niveaux : les variétés (diversité génétique), les espèces et leurs fonctionnements biologiques (« diversité fonctionnelle »). D'après une étude récente, cultiver un plus grand nombre d'espèces et de groupes d'espèces (céréales, légumineuses, oléagineux, e...
Increasing global food demand, low grain reserves and climate change threaten the stability of food systems on national to global scales1–5. Policies to increase yields, irrigation and tolerance of crops to drought have been proposed as stability-enhancing solutions1,6,7. Here we evaluate a complementary possibility—that greater diversity of crops...
Because natural ecosystems are complex, it is difficult to predict how their variability scales across space and levels of organization. The species‐insurance hypothesis predicts that asynchronous dynamics among species should reduce variability when biomass is aggregated either from local species populations to local multispecies communities, or f...
Which ecosystem services are addressed? Provisioning: agricultural production (crops, pork), provision of clean water, maple syrup production, milk production
Agriculture's influence on humanity is a dichotomy of promise and peril. Research on the food‐environment dilemma has highlighted the environmental consequences of food production, yet the identification of management solutions is an ongoing challenge.
We suggest “bright spots” as a promising tool to identify levers of change by finding areas that...
This volume seeks to advance understanding of indigenous knowledge (IK) in the context of natural resource management. The book links theory and practice in providing an overview of the conceptual issues surrounding IK enquiries in the context of their contributions to sustainable agriculture and environmental conservation. Key themes are addressed...
Decline in agricultural biodiversity (cultivated species and wild species used for food or that support agro-ecosystem functioning) at the farm scale has fueled concerns about potential negative effects of this biodiversity loss on the ecological and economic sustainability of agro-ecosystems. Despite these concerns, formal assessment of how agro-b...
Ecosystem services (ES) span the interface of social and ecological systems, which makes them inherently challenging to measure. Tracking ES patterns over long time frames is crucial for understanding slow variables and complex interactions, but long-term studies of ES are rare. Historical records can play an important role in revealing temporal pa...
The formation, functioning and emergent properties of patterned landscapes have recently drawn increased attention, notably in semi-arid ecosystems. We describe and analyze a set of similarly spectacular landforms in seasonal tropical wetlands. Surales landscapes, comprised of densely packed, regularly spaced mounds, cover large areas of the Orinoc...
Sampling design for phytoliths in Site 1 and 2.
Vertical dotted lines represent the trenches in which we took phytolith samples from profiles.
(TIF)
Plant species encountered during the wet season in the point-intersect line transects in Sites 1, 2, 3 and 5, and their contribution to the percentage of cover abundance in surales mound and inter-mound habitats.
(PDF)
Tree species encountered in Site 3 during the dry and the wet season.
(DOCX)
Plant species encountered during the dry season in the point-intersect line transects in Sites 1, 2 and 3, and their contribution to the percentage of cover abundance in surales mound and inter-mound habitats.
(DOCX)
Key messages
• Soil is an important habitat for thousand millions of organisms.
• Soil biodiversity is extremely diverse in shapes, colours, sizes and functions.
• Soil biodiversity is globally distributed, from deserts to polar regions through grasslands, forests, urban and agricultural areas.
• Soil biodiversity supports many services essential t...
To maximize specific ecosystem services (ES) such as food production, people alter landscape structure, i.e., the types of ecosystems present, their relative proportions, and their spatial arrangement across landscapes. This can have significant, and sometimes unexpected, effects on biodiversity and ES. Communities need information about how land-u...
Managing multiple ecosystem services (ES), including addressing
trade-offs between services and preventing ecological surprises, is
among the most pressing areas for sustainability research. These
challenges require ES research to go beyond the currently common
approach of snapshot studies limited to one or two services at a
single point in time. W...
Background/Question/Methods
Nature provides a wide range of benefits to people. Past attempts to enhance a specific ecosystem service (ES), such as food production, have often led to unexpected and undesirable effects on other ES. To reduce these unwanted results, we need to better understand relationships among ES and the conditions under which s...
New approaches to pre-‐Columbian raised-‐field agriculture: ecology of seasonally flooded savannas, and living raised fields in Africa, as windows on the past and the future.
This paper summarizes phytolith analyses from four pre-Columbian agricultural raised-field sites of the coastal savannahs of French Guiana—Savane Grand Macoua, Piliwa, Bois Diable and K-VIII—and carbon isotope analyses from the first-named site. The combined phytolith and 13C isotope analyses evidence the transformation of the landscape from a rela...
We studied how Amerindian cultivators of manioc in Amazonia simultaneously maintain the genetic diversity and the agronomic performance of their populations of this plant. A shrub domesticated in Amazonia probably over 7000 years ago, manioc is today the staple food for over a half-billion people throughout the tropical world. It is propagated by f...
Le manioc, plante originaire de l’Amazonie, est aujourd’hui cultivé dans l’ensemble des régions tropicales. Cultivé pour ses racines charnues riches en amidon, le manioc constitue la base de l’alimentation de près d’un milliard de personnes. Si le manioc est l’une des plantes alimentaires les moins exigeantes et peut aller jusqu’à tolérer des condi...
Background and AimsPlant defence traits against herbivores incur production costs that are usually difficult to measure. However, estimating these costs is a prerequisite for characterizing the plant defence strategy as a whole. Myrmecophytes are plants that provide symbiotic ants with specialized nesting cavities, called domatia, in exchange for p...
The need to reconcile food production, ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation has spurred the search for more sustainable ways of farming. Archaeology offers examples of prehistoric pathways to agricultural intensification that could be rich sources of inspiration for applying ecological engineering in agriculture today. We examine one se...
Background and aims
Seasonally flooded South American savannas harbor different kinds of mound-field landscapes of largely unknown origin. A recent study used soil carbon-isotope depth profiles and other proxies to infer vegetation history in murundu landscapes in Brazil. Results suggested that differential erosion, not building-up processes (e.g.,...
Le transport des graines par les fourmis dans des microsites favorables par leur enfouissement dans les nids est considéré comme l'un des principaux avantages de la myrmécochorie. Cependant, les chambres des nids peuvent être situées à des profondeurs ne permettant pas l'émergence des plantules. Le succès de la germination dépendrait alors d'un tra...
Placement of seeds in favourable microsites by inhumation in ant nests is considered a principal advantage of myrmecochory. However, nest chambers may be too deep to allow seedling emergence. In this case, successful germination requires secondary transport of seeds to shallower sites. Little is known about the architecture of nests of seed-dispers...
The scale and nature of pre-Columbian human impacts in Amazonia are currently hotly debated. Whereas pre-Columbian people dramatically changed the distribution and abundance of species and habitats in some parts of Amazonia, their impact in other parts is less clear. Pioneer research asked whether their effects reached even further, changing how ec...
