Gérard Balent

Gérard Balent
French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE) | INRAE · Department of Forest, Grassland and Freshwater Ecology

Agronomist, Docteur ès Sciences in Ecology

About

172
Publications
51,244
Reads
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3,255
Citations
Introduction
My research interests encompass landscape ecology, forest and grassland biodiversity, forest fragmentation, disturbance effect of management practices on animal and vegetal communities, long-term dynamics in ecosystems, biodiversity assessment, modelling communities’ structure and dynamics, interdisciplinary work linking social and ecological systems.
Additional affiliations
December 1979 - present
French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE)
Position
  • Research Director
Education
September 1984 - December 1987
University of Rennes
Field of study
  • Ecology
September 1973 - September 1974
Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris
Field of study
  • Animal Ecology
September 1971 - June 1974

Publications

Publications (172)
Article
The difficulty to spatially link the process levels of organizing agricultural management with those of investigating biodiversity preservation creates a spatial scale mismatch which affects the effectiveness of agri-environmental policies. Starting from a literature review this study offers a panorama of the ways authors approach spatial scale mis...
Article
Full-text available
Temporal variation in the composition of species assemblages could be the result of deter-ministic processes driven by environmental change and/or stochastic processes of coloniza-tion and local extinction. Here, we analyzed the relative roles of deterministic and stochastic processes on bird assemblages in an agricultural landscape of southwestern...
Article
Full-text available
Rural forests are characterized by different levels of formal and nonformal appropriation by rural communities who have generally managed, shaped, or rebuilt these forest formations over many generations with refined local knowledge and practices related to their use and perpetuation. Rural forests are therefore social-ecological systems that contr...
Article
Full-text available
The ecosystem services provided by agricultural landscapes depend on numerous ecological processes, as well as on the latter’s multiscale interactions with farmland management practices. These processes and their interactions are very complex and, currently, we lack a well-supported methodology for examining their effects on landscape-level ecosyst...
Article
Full-text available
Ecological intensification prospects of fodder services provided by pastures of French mountains. A comparative analysis A comparative analysis of the forage services provided by pastures to farms was conducted in 3 mountainous regions (Bigorre, Livradois, and Vercors). It permitted an evaluation of the remaining margins for intensifying agricultur...
Article
Full-text available
On oceanic islands, strong human impacts on habitats, combined with introductions of exotic species, modify the composition of terrestrial bird assemblages and threaten their ecological functions. In La Réunion, an oceanic island located in the Madagascan region, a national park was established in 2007 to counter the ecosystem-level effects of thre...
Article
Full-text available
Societal demand for multifunctional agricultural landscapes keeps increasing. To promote such landscapes, it is necessary to identify which components of landscape heterogeneity support multiple ecosystem services, as well as levers of action to promote these landscape properties. The social-ecological theoretical framework for multifunctional land...
Article
Societal demand for multifunctional agricultural landscapes keeps increasing. To promote such landscapes, it is necessary to identify which components of landscape heterogeneity support multiple ecosystem services, as well as levers of action to promote these landscape properties. The social-ecological theoretical framework for multifunctional land...
Article
Full-text available
Biodiversity has undergone a major decline throughout recent decades, particularly in farmland. Agricultural practices are recognised to be an important pressure on farmland biodiversity, and pesticides are suspected to be one of the main causes of this decline in biodiversity. As part of the national plan for reduction of pesticides use (Ecophyto)...
Article
Rural landscapes of western Europe have considerably changed in the last decades under the combined pressure of climate and land use changes, leading to a dramatic decline of farmland biodiversity, including common farmland birds. The respective roles of climate and land use and cover changes in driving bird population trends are primarily assessed...
Article
Significance Agricultural landscape homogenization is a major ongoing threat to biodiversity and the delivery of key ecosystem services for human well-being. It is well known that increasing the amount of seminatural cover in agricultural landscapes has a positive effect on biodiversity. However, little is known about the role of the crop mosaic it...
Article
Full-text available
Aim The environmental filtering process is often considered as static in ecological studies. However, growing evidence shows that species‐environment relationships vary in space and time. In this study, we assessed to what extent bird responses to landscape components can be geographically generalised and whether differences in response generality...
Article
Full-text available
Abstract. 1. The relative importance of local- and landscape-scale factors on butterfly diversity can depend on the quality, management intensity and landscape context of habitat patches. This study aims to disentangle these local and landscape effects on taxonomic and functional composition of butterfly communities within mosaic agricultural lands...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In wet tropical conditions, the improved pastures are usually implanted after deforestation and most times with a single forage grass (mainly C4 and exotic grasses) and more rarely with legumes. These artificial grasslands ecosystems are more unstable than native pastures. Grasslands can be degraded by the colonization of “undesirable” plants. Thes...
Article
Full-text available
Extensive livestock systems in mountainous regions have allowed the preservation of numerous ecosystem services that are crucial for sustainable development. In this study, we assessed multilevel relationships between farmland management practices and agricultural landscape composition and configuration. The goal was to determine the conditions und...
Article
The ecosystem services provided by agricultural landscapes depend on numerous ecological processes, as well as on the latter's multiscale interactions with farmland management practices. These processes and their interactions are very complex and, currently, we lack a well-supported methodology for examining their effects on landscape-level ecosyst...
Article
Full-text available
Agriculture in mountainous regions shapes the landscape. However, given agriculture's decline, can it still act to maintain open spaces and prevent the land from returning to its wild state? Landscape changes vary from region to region and are determined by the type and scale of changes in farming practices and production systems. In this study, we...
Article
Full-text available
This paper examines the potential of MODIS-NDVI time series for detecting clear-cuts in a coniferous forest stand in the south of France. The proposed approach forms part of a survey monitoring the status of forest health and evaluating the forest decline phenomena observed over the last few decades. One of the prerequisites for this survey was tha...
Article
Full-text available
Des travaux développés dans le cadre du projet ANR Mouve « Les interactions entre élevage et territoire dans la mise en mouvement de l’intensification écologique »1 (2010 – 2014) sont publiés dans ce numéro de Fourrages et dans le suivant. Les objectifs principaux de Mouve étaient doubles : - produire de nouvelles connaissances sur les « conditions...
Article
Full-text available
Three analytical tools were used to examine changes in pastures located in different rural areas in the Central Pyrenees. The results obtained were analysed in tandem with data on environmental parameters (e.g., climate, soil properties, and forage composition) and information obtained from surveys conducted with farmers. We were thus able to deter...
Article
Full-text available
A comparative analysis of the forage services provided by pastures to farms was conducted in 3 mountainous regions (Bigorre, Livradois, and Vercors). It permitted an evaluation of the remaining margins for intensifying agricultural production in an agroecological context. Using identical or comparable methods, management practices and plant communi...
Article
Full-text available
Three analytical tools were used to examine changes in pastures located in different rural areas in the Central Pyrenees. The results obtained were analysed in tandem with data on environmental parameters (e.g., climate, soil properties, and forage composition) and information obtained from surveys conducted with farmers. We were thus able to deter...
Article
Full-text available
Agriculture in mountainous regions shapes the landscape. However, given agriculture’s decline, can it still act to maintain open spaces and prevent the land from returning to its wild state? Landscape changes vary from region to region and are determined by the type and scale of changes in farming practices and production systems. In this study, we...
Poster
Full-text available
Atteindre l’objectif affiché de réduction du niveau d’usage de produits phytosanitaires tout en maintenant les niveaux de production des cultures implique la mise en place de stratégies de protection des cultures alternatives à la lutte chimique. L’adoption de pratiques plus favorables à la biodiversité dans les agroécosystèmes pourrait contribuer...
Article
Full-text available
REBONDS - Nos paysages emblématiques de montagnes, collines, bocages et marais sont constitués d'une mosaïque de milieux façonnés au fil des siècles par les pratiques paysannes. La vitalité de ces espaces, de plus en plus appréciés par nos sociétés urbanisées, se dégrade rapidement quand ils ne sont plus entretenus par le pâturage des troupeaux not...
Article
In this paper we assess the capacity of satellite images to explain and predict bird community patterns in farm-wood landscapes in southwestern France. Our goal is to examine the effect of the images’ acquisition date and spatial resolution on the models’ performance. We also seek to assess whether unclassified images provide results comparable wit...
Article
Full-text available
In Europe, the 2003 summer heat wave damaged forested areas. This study aims to compare two approaches of NDVI time series analysis to monitor forest decline. Both methods analyze the trend of vegetation activity from 2000 to 2011. The first method is based on a phenometric related to spring vegetation activity, calculated for each year during the...
Article
Full-text available
Most people in forest and rural areas manage trees as part of their livelihood systems. The resulting "domestic" or "rural" forests are distinct from conventional forest. They have historically been overlooked by the forestry sector and impacted by forest policies and regulatory frameworks. These forests presently encounter requalification and valu...
Article
Full-text available
To predict the impact of environmental change on species distributions, it has been hypothesized that community-level models could give some benefits compared to species-level models. In this study we have assessed the performance of these two approaches. We surveyed 256 bird communities in an agricultural landscape in southwest France at the same...
Data
The study site showing the 256 point counts performed in 1982 and 2007. In 1982, the point counts were settled in a stratified design of 21clusters representing the diversity of land-use types. The point counts were separated from each other by 250 m in each cluster. Represented land uses are woodlands (black), grasslands (dark grey), crops (light...
Data
The number of sites occupied by bird species in 1982 and 2007 (N = 256). (DOC)
Article
Full-text available
Dans le cadre du projet européen BIOBIO, nous avons comparé entre pays les richesses en habitats et richesses spécifiques cumulées de quatre groupes taxonomiques (plantes, abeilles sauvages, araignées, vers de terre), de 169 exploitations biologiques ou conventionnelles appartenant à 10 pays. Pour le cas d’étude français, Vallées et Coteaux de Gasc...
Article
Full-text available
Quantifying the impact of land-use changes on biodiversity is a major challenge in conservation ecology. Static spatial relationships between bird communities and agricultural landscapes have been extensively studied. Yet, their ability to mirror the effects of temporal land-use dynamics remains to be demonstrated. Here, we test whether such space-...
Article
Full-text available
In agriculture and environmental sustainability research, assessment of local diversity of individual farm dynamics and farmers' behaviors appears of special interest for enlightening changes in ecological, social, and economical functions related to farming in rural communities and landscapes. It also includes challenges due to current methodology...
Book
Agricultural landscapes approximately occupy 40% of available land surface. As such they constitute a eystone in biodiversity conservation programs. In return, biodiversity contributes to production through ecosystem services as pollination or pest control. In this perspective, deciphering the role of agricultural landscape heterogeneity in maintai...
Article
Full-text available
Effective solutions for integrating agricultural development and conservation of biodiversity at the landscape scale remain to be identified. We present a case study in an intensively farmed French cereal plain, where the reintroduction of grasslands has been proposed first for conservation purposes in order to protect the Little Bustard, a highly...
Article
Full-text available
Dans les milieux de savanes, l'identification des surfaces brûlées et leur suivi sont des informations essentielles pour assurer une bonne gestion et conservation de ces écosystèmes. L'approche choisie repose sur l'analyse de séries temporelles d'images de télédétection à moyenne résolution spatiale. Les savanes étudiées sont situées sur le bassin...
Article
Boundaries between woodlots and agricultural habitats are numerous in temperate agricultural landscapes and influence ecological processes in both woodlots and agricultural habitats. 2 We aimed to determine how far the species assemblage of ground beetles in woodlot and open habitats was influenced by the presence of the woodlot-field boundary. 3 W...
Chapter
Full-text available
This book contains 28 chapters with emphasis on the interactive nature of the relationships between the soil, plant, animal and environmental components of grassland systems, both natural and managed. It analyses the present knowledge and the future trends of research for combining the classical view of grasslands, as a resource for secure feeding...
Article
Full-text available
The point count method is very widely used for estimating bird abundances. In studies of bird–environment relationships, the duration used for point counts varies considerably from one study to another. Short counting times may increase the number of false absences while long counting times increase the probability that birds initially absent immig...
Article
In savannah areas where fire is a predominant practice, the localization and the monitoring of burned areas are essential information to develop an accurate management system of this ecosystem. This problem is addressed through the analysis of time series of medium spatial-resolution remotely sensed images. The authors studied the savannah localize...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Rural forests are forests that are more or less formally appropriated, managed, shaped or rebuilt by rural communities, who have developed refined local knowledge and practices related to their use and perpetuation. Based on detailed monographs, we compared eleven situations of rural forests both from developing and developed countries, localized w...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Wooded landscape elements are supposed to enhance biological control of pest thanks to natural enemies by provided with alternative preys, nectar and pollen resources, and refuges against unfavourable weather conditions. On the basis of two research studies in south western France we identified key features in woody elements contributing to biologi...
Book
Farm forests, i.e. forests managed by farmers, are important components of French landscapes. Farmers, who do not have knowledge in sylviculture in general, harvest them for firewood and timberwood, but also for hunting, mushroom harvesting or grazing. The social and ecological functions of these woods call for a better understanding of their manag...
Article
Full-text available
The Coteaux de Gascogne region, an upland area in south-western France, is a site where studies related to the future of landscapes and the sustainability of natural resource management are well documented. The local agricultural system is induced by a "house centred" society with the particularity of passing on the inheritance and farm estate iden...
Article
Full-text available
Natural reforestation of European mountain landscapes raises major environmental and societal issues. With local stakeholders in the Pyrenees National Park area (France), we studied agricultural landscape colonisation by ash (Fraxinus excelsior) to enlighten its impacts on biodiversity and other landscape functions of importance for the valley soci...
Article
Full-text available
In order to understand the capacity of habitats to conserve species, many authors have searched for a species–area relationship (SAR) to evaluate the effect of patch size on species richness in habitat fragments. However, a range of different processes may underlie or obscure this relationship. For woody plant species in forest fragments, as for ot...
Article
Full-text available
Les Coteaux de Gascogne constituent un des terrains de recherche sur l’avenir des paysages ruraux et la durabilité de la gestion des ressources naturelles. Cette petite région du Sud-Ouest de la France est historiquement fondée sur un système social dit « à maison » caractérisé par une permamence des patrimoines fonciers et des exploitations agrico...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
A characteristic of French private forest is the small size of the properties: half of them have an area of less than 25 ha. Yet regularly obligations do not impose particular forest management in these small properties, unlike in larger ones for which a management schedule (Plan Simple de Gestion) approved by the Centre Régional de la Propriété Fo...
Article
Full-text available
While small, fragmented wooded elements do not represent a large surface area in agricultural landscape, their role in the sustainability of ecological processes is recognized widely. Unfortunately, landscape ecology studies suffer from the lack of methods for automatic detection of these elements. We propose a hybrid approach using both aerial pho...
Article
There is need for documenting the long-term effects of plant invasions at the landscape scale. We investigated the possible catalytic effect of invasive Acacia mearnsii De Wild. on the colonization of rural landscapes by native plant species on Reunion Island (Mascarene Archipelago, Indian Ocean). Data were recorded from 182 circular plots of 50 m(...
Chapter
Full-text available
The species–environment relationships for woody species may vary according to the forest layers considered. In fragmented forest, spatial configuration may also influence forest layer composition. We investigated the relationships between four forest layer compositions and environmental conditions, and spatial variables accounting for forest fragme...
Article
Full-text available
The 4th Days of the French branch of the International Association for Landscape Ecology (IALE-France) were organised in Toulouse by the DYNAFOR Joint Research Unit on the theme of the study of farm/forest interfaces in respect of landscapes. This article presents the contents of a selection of papers given that are the topic of the special issue o...
Article
Full-text available
The species-environment relationship for woody species may vary according to the forest layers considered. In fragmented forest stands, spatial configuration may also influence forest layer composition. We investigated the relationships between four forest layer compositions and environmental conditions, and spatial variables accounting for forest...
Article
Calibration and validation of simulation models describing herbage growth or feed quality of semi-natural grasslands is a complex task for agronomists without investing effort into botanical surveys. To facilitate such modelling efforts, a limited number of grassland types were identified using a functional classification of species. These grasslan...
Article
The 4th Days or the French branch of the International Association for Landscape Ecology (lALE-France) were organised in Toulouse by the DYNAFOR Joint Research Unit on the theme of the study of farm/forest interfaces in respect of landscapes. This article presents the contents of a selection of papers given that are the topic of the special issue o...
Article
Full-text available
• Seedling banks of woody species established under closed canopy have received little consideration in coppice forests despite their potential importance for natural regeneration. • This study aimed to evaluate the influences of canopy composition and of distance from the nearest forest edge on the abundance and species richness of the seedling ba...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Facing up the stakes concerning the durability of the European agricultural systems, researchers try to model social, economical and ecological determinants of rural landscapes. Those models, like multi-agent system, require the understanding of complex decision and interaction processes. In Western Europe, the legislative pressures (CAP) but also...
Article
Full-text available
Landscape encroachment and reforestation in mountain areas further to land abandonment and land-use extensification raises topical issues for sustainable development. An acknowledged challenge for the future of local agriculture is to contribute to the maintenance of a variety of landscape functions. In Pyrenean landscapes colonised by ash tree, la...