François-Michel Le Tourneau

French National Centre for Scientific Research | CNRS · UMR 8586 PRODIG - Joint Research Unit PRODIG - Campus Condorcet

Introduction Social determinants of health, such as living and working conditions, economical and environmental context and access to care, combine to impact the health of individuals and communities. In French Guiana (FG), the persons working in informal artisanal and small-scale gold mining in the rainforest are a particularly vulnerable populati...

Cet article documente l’évolution de la composition des effectifs de la Légion étrangère par zone de provenance au cours de son histoire. Il montre les mécanismes qui permettraient d’expliquer les fluctuations, et présente plus en détail la configuration de la Légion étrangère en 2022, démontrant la récente globalisation de ses effectifs et la mont...

This contribution points out that while the importance of hydrologic, geomorphic, ecological, temporal, and socio‐cultural connectivity in the functioning of hydrosystems has been acknowledged in three dimensions (longitudinal, lateral, and vertical), vertical connectivity has often been overlooked. Drawing on a multidisciplinary literature review,...

Les grands espaces, ou régions faiblement peuplées, se distinguent par une série de caractéristiques spécifiques et notamment par un contrôle incomplet de la part des États. Cela ouvre des brèches pour l’exercice de pratiques qui, si elles sont ou illégales ou à la limite de la légalité, apportent des ressources économiques, des connaissances sur l...

The unexpected fall of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon in 2022 has shown that deforestation phenomena are complex and that for many observers it is difficult to find their way in statistics and geospatial databases that are produced using different methodologies and distinct definitions of what deforestation is and considering in diverging wa...

The way vegetation is officially named, classified, and identified has critical implications for ecosystems and biodiversity conservation. Yet little attention is given to how such issues hinder the efficacy of laws mandating environmental conservation on private land. In the Brazilian Amazon where half of the land is now already under private tenu...

Ideias chave do capítulo: - A regularização ambiental requer uma série de condições (parcerias, incentivos e mobilização) para produzir efeitos tangíveis - Porém estas condições não são suficientes e iniciativas implantadas por municípios revelam uma série de empecilhos e dificuldades recorrentes - Apesar de resultados heterogêneos, iniciativas loc...

The Tucson metropolitan area, located in the Sonoran Desert of southeastern Arizona (USA), is affected by both massive population growth and rapid climate change, resulting in important land use and land cover (LULC) changes. As its fragile arid ecosystem and scarce resources are increasingly under pressure, there is a crucial need to monitor such...

Sparsely populated regions (SPRs) have specific features like remoteness and low population densities but also specific identities constructed by their inhabitants based on their relationship with their environment and the consequences to their lifestyles. Although theoretical frameworks have been developed for SPRs, two challenges remain when it c...

We explored a 320-km transect in the Tumucumaque mountain range along the border between southern French Guiana and Brazil, sampling all trees and lianas with DBH ≥ 10 cm in seven 25 x 25-m plots installed near seven boundary milestones. We isolated DNA from cambium tissue and sequenced two DNA barcodes (rbcLa and matK) to aid in species identifica...

Climate change, population growth, and declining federal budgets are threatening the health of ecosystems, and the services they provide. Under these changing conditions, managing landscapes and resources assumes new and unprecedented challenges. Adaptive management has been identified as a natural resource management approach that allows practitio...

Worldwide, the socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 disproportionally affect vulnerable groups in society. This paper assesses responses to, and impacts of, the pandemic among mobile migrant populations who work in Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining (ASGM) in Suriname and French Guiana. These populations are characterized by poverty, informal or il...

Artisanal small-scale gold mining, or garimpo in Portuguese, started in French Guiana in the 1990s. The French authorities have repressed it, but this has not led to the end of the activity. Based on extensive fieldwork, this paper aims to analyze the garimpo as an economic and social informal world built to be resilient to repression and to neutra...

The French territory of Guiana is currently exploited illegally by thousands of small-scale artisanal gold miners who extract each year between 5 and 10 tons of gold and smuggle them into Suriname and Brazil. Almost exclusively Brazilian and called garimpeiros, these miners deploy in French Guiana the economic, social and cultural system that makes...

The increase in the price of gold, due to a shift to safe investments during the global economic crisis, has led to a rapid expansion of gold production. Alongside legal gold mines, wildcat gold mining has developed in French Guiana since the early 2000s. This phenomenon, with its social, environmental and economic consequences, is at the heart of...

Soundscapes are increasingly used as innovative entry doors in environmental studies. Facing huge libraries of sound files which cannot be processed manually, acoustic indices provide an overview to the information contained in them, as well as to allow for automatic processing. Studies dealing with such indices have, however, focused more on speci...

Depuis le début du mandat du président Bolsonaro, les Amérindiens d’Amazonie font face à une politique extrêmement agressive visant à rogner les droits, en particulier fonciers, qui leur ont été alloués par la Constitution de 1988. Cette pression multiforme s’exerce à la fois par des actions directes (tentatives de modification de textes légaux, ro...

The paradoxes of restoring a dry river in the southwestern United States: the case of the Santa Cruz The focus of this article is on the socio-ecological issues raised by various methods of stream management such as those illustrated by the Santa Cruz River in Southern Arizona. Dried up since the 1940s owing to excessive exploitation of the groundw...

Natural soundscapes correspond to the acoustical patterns produced by biological and geophysical sound sources at different spatial and temporal scales for a given habitat. This pilot study aims to characterize the temporal-modulation information available to humans when perceiving variations in soundscapes within and across natural habitats. This...

Remote sensing of forest environments through sound holds promise for a renewed and extended effort in monitoring vegetation distribution and associated characteristics. Here we introduce a new acoustic sensing approach that exploits the geometric phase of ground-supported acoustic waves, such as seismic waves, resulting from their scattering by tr...

The Amazon forests, the Northern artic regions, the Australian bush and Siberian plains all have very low demographic densities, but they are rarely studied as pertaining to the same global category. It appears, however, that when considering sparsely populated regions (SPR) globally they share not only demographical characteristics, but also a num...

Os dados coletados em campo pelo projeto DURAMAZ permitem retratar com alta precisão a situação demográfica, econômica e social dos sítios estudados. Além disso, a maior parte das informações sendo compatíveis, entre a fase 1 e 2 do projeto, permitem também analisar as mudanças que ocorreram entre os dois períodos de pesquisa, ou seja, entre 2007 e...

A vila de São Francisco do Iratapuru havia sido incluída na amostra dos sítios na primeira fase do projeto DURAMAZ, em função de uma parceria inovadora que estabeleceu com a multinacional brasileira de cosméticos Natura. Se tal aliança ainda se mantém, a maior parte das mudanças registradas, desde 2007 nas condições de vida e na economia local, não...

The 2018 election in Brazil has allowed a ultra-conservative political force to power, leading to new challenges to Indigenous land rights in the country. Despite the warranties offered by the 1988 Constitution, the government of Jair Bolsonaro is determined to halt any new demarcation of Indigenous lands, and to shrink as much as possible the exis...

The 2018 election in Brazil has allowed a ultra-conservative political force to power, leading to new challenges to Indigenous land rights in the country. Despite the warranties offered by the 1988 Constitution, the government of Jair Bolsonaro is determined to halt any new demarcation of Indigenous lands, and to shrink as much as possible the exis...

The Amazon region has been undergoing profound transformations since the late '70s through forest degradation , land use changes and effects of global climate change. The perception of such changes by local communities is important for risk analysis and for subsequent societal decision making. In this study, we compare and contrast observations and...

L’étalement des grandes villes est l’un des principaux moteurs de la transformation de l’espace aux États-Unis et en Arizona. Il est souvent vu comme un exemple emblématique de ce phénomène consommateur d’espace et gourmand en eau. Tucson et l’unité administrative dont elle dépend, le Pima County, émergent dans ce contexte comme un contre-modèle, a...

L'Amazonie n’existe pas » : c’est sur ce constat paradoxal que s’ouvre cet ouvrage, pour souligner que la dimension mythique et mythologique de cette région l’emporte souvent sur la réalité géographique. Tout commence par son nom, qui fait référence à une légende tirée de l’Antiquité grecque, à mille lieues du contexte de la forêt équatoriale que l...

Background In April 2017, Suriname’s Ministry of Health alerted French Guiana’s Regional Health Agency (RHA) about an increase of imported malaria cases among people coming from an illegal gold mining site called Sophie, in French Guiana, a French overseas territory located in the Amazonian forest. Methods Due to safety issues and the remoteness o...

Land tenure in the Western US, in particular in the most recent states, reflects the processes of appropriation which took place after the annexing of Northern Mexico by the US in 1848. It is characterized by a high proportion of public (federal and state) lands, as well as by a spatial configuration where influences of the homesteading and of land...

Notre planète compte aujourd'hui plus de 400 arbres par être humain. Ces trois trillions d'arbres appartiennent à plus de 80000 espèces différentes. Ce sont des organismes vivants complexes et très anciens, apparus sur Terre il y a au moins 385 millions d'années, précédant ainsi de très loin l'apparition du genre Homo (il y a 3 millions d'années)....

Depuis la fin des années 2000, et en contraste avec son image désastreuse dans ce domaine acquise durant les années 1980, le Brésil cherche à se doter d'une image de pays responsable en matière d'environnement. Derrière l'ambition des mots et les postures officielles, l'article étudie les nombreuses ambiguïtés des mesures accomplies sur un chemin c...

More than half of the US rural population lives inside metro or micropolitan areas and even at more disaggregated scales, such as the census tracts, most spatial units mix rural and urban population. At a national scale, only 30% of the country are inhabited by 100% urban or 100% rural population, implying that more than two third of the US territo...

Generations of explorers have been fascinated by The Tumuc Humac mounts, or montanhas Tumucumaque in Portuguese. The real geographical nature of such “mounts”, however, is rather dubious since if they correspond to real-life experiences for some, other consider that they do not even exist. They seem to correspond more to a myth, carrying several le...

The 1988 Constitution of Brazil, which recognizes extensively indigenous land rights, seemed to make possible the reparation of the historical prejudice represented by the territorial dispossession of Indigenous peoples. However, after 30 years, the reconciliation did not take place. Vast swaths of Brazil (about 12.3%) were recognized as Indigenous...

Climate change in the Amazon region is the subject of many studies not only due to its stance as an emblematic ecosystem but also as a region where changes have been dramatic for over 30 years, mainly due to deforestation. We investigate how people settled in the Amazon perceive environmental changes by comparing these perceptions with satellite ra...

The economic modernization of the Amazon fostered by the Brazilian military government during the 1960s and 1970s was largely realized without taking into consideration the presence of local households which lived from the extraction of forest products (mainly non-timber). When they began to be expulsed, a political resistance, often guided by the...

En plus d’un panorama d’ensemble de « l’américanisme » en France, le livre blanc de l’IdA présente une synthèse pour la plupart des disciplines de sciences humaines et sociales et pour chacun des trois espaces : Amérique du nord, Amérique latine et Caraïbes. Il présente aussi une riche synthèse des centres de documentation et des bibliothèques qui...