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Publications
Publications (398)
Nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions from agricultural soil were studied during 6 consecutive years on three plots of two real farms. We analyzed a total of 37 agricultural sequences: 20 sequences with crops including wheat, maize, and legumes and 17 fallow sequences with cover crops, volunteers or bare fallow soils. Controlling factors of N2O emissions w...
In the context of political and economic instability, food self-sufficiency of countries and territories is becoming a burning issue. Reunion Island is a densely populated small French territory isolated in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The previously developed GRAFS model, allowing consistent balances to be established using nitrogen (N) as a co...
Research on mechanisms of organic matter degradation, bacterial activities, phytoplankton dynamics, and other processes has led to the development of numerous sophisticated water quality models. The earliest model, dating back to 1925, was based on first-order kinetics for organic matter degradation. The community-centered freshwater biogeochemistr...
Research on mechanisms of organic matter degradation, bacterial activities, phytoplankton dynamics, and other processes has led to the development of numerous sophisticated water quality models since one of the first in 1925, based on first order kinetics for organic matter degradation. The community-centered aquatic biogeochemistry model RIVE was...
Irrigation, one of the 28 agri-environmental indicators defined in the European Common Agricultural Policy, is often neglected in agricultural nitrogen (N) budgets, while it can be a considerable source of N in irrigated agriculture. The annual N input from irrigation water sources (NIrrig) to cropping systems was quantified for Europe for 2000-201...
Along its route through the agro-food system nitrogen (N) can be wasted, heightening diverse environmental problems. Geopolitical instabilities affect prices of N fertilisers and livestock feed, challenging production systems and increasing their need to reduce N waste. The analysis of N flows is essential to understanding the agroenvironmental per...
Domestic herbivores have been closely associated with the historical evolution and development of agriculture systems worldwide as a complementary system for providing milk, meat, wool, leather, and animal power. However, their major role was to enhance and maintain agricultural soil fertility through the recycling of nutrients. In turn, cereal pro...
Ammonia (NH3) volatilization, nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, and nitrate (NO3-) leaching from agriculture cause severe environmental hazards. Research studies and mitigation strategies have mostly focused on one of these nitrogen (N) losses at a time, often without an integrated view of the agro-food system. Yet, at the regional scale, N2O, NH3, an...
Three scenarios for the future of the French agro-food system were specified for the territory draining into the Seine Bight, comprising Paris megacity and the Seine watershed. The first scenario assumes the pursuit of the current trend of opening and specialization of agriculture, as well as of concentration of population within the Paris agglomer...
Starting from the study of the major impacts of human activity in the Seine river basin on ground- and surface water quality, due to domestic and industrial wastewater and to intensive agricultural practices, a research framework was developed, combining the analysis of the agricultural systems, their connection to food requirement by local populat...
Reservoirs are active reactors for the biogeochemical cycling of carbon (C) and nutrients (nitrogen: N, phosphorus: P, and silica: Si), however, our in-depth understanding of C and nutrient cycling in reservoirs is still limited by the fact that it involves a variety of closely linked and coupled biogeochemical and hydrological processes. In this s...
The Marine Strategy Framework Directive determines the conditions for good status of marine environments and explicitly asks river-basin managers to improve the consideration of marine environmental objectives when elaborating action plans for regulating the imbalanced river nutrients fluxes that enrich and support
harmful algal blooms in coastal a...
Biogeochemical watershed models are now prompted to reconcile the need to expand their spatial extent up to the regional scale where coastal damages are observed, and to increase their spatial and temporal resolution to accurately depict the transformation, elimination/immobilization of carbon and nutrients during their in stream transfers. While r...
In excess compared to the other major nutrients, nitrogen (N) -transported mainly in the form of nitrates- from land surfaces to coastal areas, is responsible for harmful algal blooms in coastal areas. In France, most of the water loads of N transferred to the sea comes from fertilization on agricultural surfaces and their highly leached surpluses...
Estuaries are key reactive ecosystems along the land–ocean aquatic continuum, with significant ecological and economic value. However, they have been facing strong morphological management changes and increased nutrient and contaminant inputs, possibly leading to ecological problems such as coastal eutrophication. Therefore, it is necessary to quan...
Few studies have simultaneously addressed the issue of the short- and long-term hydrological control of organic carbon (OC) export from soils and the role of the leaching process in the long-term dynamics of the soil OC pool. We combined short- and long-term approaches by investigating dissolved organic carbon (DOC) at the outlet of a small drainag...
Rivers of Europe, Second Edition, presents the latest update on the only primary source of complete and comparative baseline data on the biological and hydrological characteristics of more than 180 of the highest profile rivers in Europe. With even more full-color photographs and maps, the book includes conservation information on current patterns...
The Seine River and its basin (70 000 km², 500 m³/s mean annual discharge) are studied since 1989 by an interdisciplinary research programme (https://www.piren-seine.fr/). The river receives the effluents of about 17 M inhab (70% from Paris conurbation) and from industries. Intensive agriculture using agrochemicals is another cause of water quality...
The Seine River and its basin (70 000 km2, 500 m3/s mean annual discharge) are studied since 1989 by an interdisciplinary research programme (https://www.piren-seine.fr/). The river receives the effluents of about 17 M inhab (70% from Paris conurbation) and from industries. Intensive agriculture using agrochemicals is another cause of water quality...
This paper presents EuropeAgriDB v1.0, a dataset of crop production and nitrogen (N) flows in European cropland 1961-2019. The dataset covers 26 present-day countries, detailing the cropland N harvests in 17 crop categories as well as cropland N inputs in synthetic fertilizers, manure, symbiotic fixation, and atmospheric deposition. The study build...
Estuaries are key reactive ecosystems along the land–ocean aquatic continuum, with significant ecological and economic value. However, they have been facing strong morphological management changes as well as increased nutrient and contaminant inputs, possibly leading to ecological problems such as coastal eutrophication. Therefore, it is necessary...
As an illustration of the usefulness of the concept of water-agro-food systems, this paper describes the mechanisms behind the nitrogen cascade from agricultural soils to the coastal sea rivers through aquifers, riparian wetlands, rivers and streams and the estuary, for the case study of the Seine river watershed and its receiving coastal sea. It i...
After World War II, the evolution of Europe's agro-food system has been marked by intensified use of synthetic fertilizers, territorial specialization, and integration in global food and feed markets. This evolution led to increased nitrogen (N) losses to aquatic environments and the atmosphere, which, despite increasing environmental regulations,...
Humans have altered the natural nitrogen and phosphorus biogeochemical cycles by the massive input of fertilizers to the agricultural system to boost production. As a result a large amount of nitrogen and phosphorus have been mobilised and delivered to the environment, creating threats to aquatic and terrestrial ecosystem functioning and human heal...
Nitrogen (N) is one of the main production factors in agricultural systems and has to be properly managed to sustain crop yields. Nowadays more than half of the N added to cropland is lost to the environment, wasting the resource, producing threats to air, water, soil and biodiversity, and generating greenhouse gas emissions. Based on FAO data of t...
At the start of the PIREN-Seine program, organic pollution by the effluent of the Parisian conurbation was responsible for episodic anoxia in the lower Seine River, while nutrients from both point and diffuse sources are used to cause eutrophication, a nuisance for drinking water production from surface water and biodiversity. The implementation of...
Based on the GRAFS method of biogeochemical accounting for nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and carbon (C) fluxes through crop, grassland, livestock and human consumption, a full description of the structure and main functioning features of the French agro-food system was obtained from 1850 to the present at the scale of 33 agricultural regions. For th...
Management of the non-renewable resource phosphorus (P) is critical to agricultural sustainability. The global P cycle is currently disturbed beyond planetary boundaries, mostly due to large excess P use in the agriculture of industrialized countries, while P is lacking in the Global South. The trajectories of P management and their effects on futu...
The frequently observed discrepancy between estimations of N2O emissions at regional or global scale based either on field data or inventories (bottom-up) or on direct atmospheric observations (top-down) suggests that riparian areas and river surfaces play a significant role as hot spots of emission. We developed a modeling procedure to assess N2O...
Au début du Programme PIREN-Seine en 1989, la pollution organique et ammoniacale de la région parisienne par des effluents encore mal traités par les stations d’épuration, était responsable de déficits sévères en oxygène en Basse Seine. Par ailleurs, les apports en éléments nutritifs, tant d’origine ponctuelle que diffuse causait des problèmes d’eu...
Le recul de trente ans d’observations directes dont bénéficie le PIREN-Seine permet de documenter des évolutions significatives dans l’organisation du système agricole du bassin de la Seine et la manière dont il affecte l’hydrosystème. Des changements paradigmatiques se sont produits au cours de cette période : l’agriculture a pris la place des rej...
The continental coastal waters of the Eastern Channel, from Normandy to Hauts-de-France, are subject to the major influence of unbalanced nutrient inputs from inflowing rivers. Several episodes of harmful algal blooms (HABs) compromising fishing and shellfish farming activities have been observed at the coast. For a better understanding of how the...
France was a traditionally agricultural country until the first half of the 20th century. Today, it is the first European cereal producer, with cereal crops accounting for 40% of the agricultural surface area used, and is also a major country for livestock breeding with 25% of the European cattle livestock. This major socioecological transition, wi...
France is a major agricultural power, characterized by a high degree of regional specialization, either in stockless cash crop farming, exporting most of its intensive cereal production, or in intensive livestock farming highly dependent on foreign feed imports. This agricultural model is characterized by wide nutrient and carbon cycle opening and...
Mixed crop and livestock farming or hyper-specialization of territories? Two prospective scenari of the French agro-food system. Current French agro-food system is characterized by a high level of territorial specialization, either towards stockless crop farming, or towards specialized animal farming highly dependent on feed imports. The resulting...
Ce numéro d'Innovations Agronomiques rassemble des articles issus de communications présentées au colloque national «Les polycultures-élevages: valoriser leurs atouts pour la transition agro-écologique » organisé par le RMT SPyCE et AgroSup Dijon, à Dijon les 10 et 11 octobre 2017.
Évaluer les impacts à long terme des activités anthropiques et des changements climatiques sur la qualité des eaux requiert l’appui de modèles capables d’intégrer la nature et l’intensité des activités humaines dans les bassins versants, tout en disposant d’une résolution spatiale et temporelle suffisante pour apprécier les modifications qui s’opèr...
Following the COP 21, it has been widely recognized that agricultural soils may contribute toward mitigating or enhancing climate change depending on their behavior as a sink or a source of carbon (C) to the atmosphere. Here, we studied the case of soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks in French cropland at the regional scale from 1852 to 2014 by coupli...
The model ECO‐MARS3D, successfully applied thus far to coastal ecosystems, has been extended to encompass the Seine estuary up to Poses, at the limit between the river and the estuary. We used updated bathymetric data and thoroughly calibrated the hydrodynamics and the sedimentary dynamics in the turbidity maximum zone (TMZ). Biogeochemical process...
Les captages de la Plaine du Saulce, qui alimentent en eau potable la communauté de communes de l'Auxerrois, sont emblématiques des problèmes de contamination posés par les pollutions diffuses d'origine agricole. A une pollution nitrique apparue à la fin des années 80, conséquence de l'intensification des pratiques, se surimpose une pollution plus...
The Generalized Representation of Agro-Food Systems approach is a biogeochemical mass-balance model for quantitatively describing agro-food systems in terms of nutrient fluxes across cropland, grassland, livestock biomass, and local human populations. We used this approach to assess the environmental consequences of the recent trend toward crop-liv...
Narratives of two prospective scenarios for the future of French agriculture were elaborated by pushing several trends already acting on the dynamics of the current system to their logical end. The first one pursues the opening and specialization characterizing the long-term evolution of the last 50 years of most French agricultural regions, while...
Facing environmental issues, such as excess of nitrogen in the biosphere, water eutrophication, carbon emission in the atmosphere or hydrological impacts, peri-urban areas are not receiving as much attention as urban areas. In this research, we focus on a French peri-urban area in the Parisian region, the Saclay plateau. Following the territorial e...
Marine eutrophication in the North-East Atlantic (NEA) strongly relies on nutrient enrichment at the river outlets, which is linked to human activities and land use in the watersheds. The question is whether human society can reduce its nutrient emissions by changing land use without compromising food security. A new version of Riverstrahler model...
Organic market gardening is often promoted by urban municipalities as a way to resource part of the food supply, creating new social links and protecting groundwater resources. The agronomical and environmental performance of six commercial organic market gardening farms supplying vegetables in Paris were evaluated and compared with other vegetable...
The lower Seine River is severely affected by the release of the treated wastewater from the 12 million inhabitants of the Paris agglomeration. Whereas urban effluents were the major source of phosphorus pollution in the late 1980s, the ban on polyphosphates from detergents in 1991 considerably reduced the phosphorus (P) loading to the Seine River...
We present a quantitative description of the N and P flows characterizing the agro-food system metabolism of 33 agricultural regions in France and their time evolution since the middle of the 19th century. The data were interpreted in terms of connection between crop production, livestock breeding, human nutrition and trade of agricultural goods, a...
Denitrification in riparian wetlands plays a major role in eliminating nitrate coming from agricultural watershed uplands before they reach river water. A new approach was developed for representing this process in the biogeochemical Riverstrahler model, using a single adjustable parameter representing the potential denitrification rate of wetland...
The Grafs-Seneque/Riverstrahler model was implemented for the first time on the Loire River for the 2002–2014 period, to explore eutrophication after improvement of wastewater treatments. The model reproduced the interannual levels and seasonal trends of the major water quality variables. Although eutrophication has been impressively reduced in the...
The Red River, draining a 169,000 km² watershed, is the second largest river in Viet Nam and constitutes the main source of water for a large percentage of the population of North Viet Nam. Here we present the results of an investigation into the spatial distribution and temporal dynamics of particulate and dissolved organic carbon (POC and DOC, re...
From the end of the 18th century, the food supply has been continuously reconfigured to meet livelihood requirements in the Paris metropolis. The food supply prerogative, which used to be a prominent responsibility of governments, was gradually scaled down to general interest controls. Private, increasingly opaque interests now govern the city's fo...
The Lot river, a major tributary of the downstream Garonne river, the largest river on the Northern side of the Pyrenees Mountains, was intensively studied in the 1970s. A pioneering program called “Lot Rivière Claire” provided a diagnosis of water quality at the scale of the whole watershed and proposed an ambitious program to manage nutrient poll...
Megacities are facing a twofold challenge regarding resources: (i) ensure their availability for a growing urban population and (ii) limit the impact of resource losses to the environment. This paper focuses on two essential resources – nitrogen and phosphorus – and challenges their sustainable management in the water-agro-food system of Paris Mega...
Analyzing a food system transition by nitrogen flow: Aussois a case study of the progressive decoupling of production and consumption
We reconstructed the one-century evolution of the agri-food system of the municipality of Aussois. We considered the nitrogen and money flows. Two periods are distinguished: from 1925 to 1965, characterized by autono...
Le suivi sur une longue période des flux de nitrates de deux aires d'alimentation de captages, en Brie laitière et dans les Plateaux de Bourgogne, montre que le respect des normes du Comifer ne suffit pas pour préserver la qualité de l'eau souterraine avec les systèmes de production actuels.
La reconception des systèmes de production, visant à la f...
En zone de grande culture spécialisées, les systèmes de production céréaliers intensifs basés sur une fertilisation presqu’exclusivement minérale et l’usage systémique de pesticides, compromettent gravement la qualité des ressources en eaux souterraines et de surface pour la consommation humaine et la santé des écosystèmes aquatiques. L’agriculture...
Riverine transport of organic carbon from terrestrial ecosystems to the oceans plays an important role in the global carbon cycle. The Red River is located in Southeast Asia where river discharge, sediment loads and fluxes of elements (carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus) associated with suspended solids have been dramatically altered over past decades...
With growing urbanization worldwide, urban sprawl is leading to the extension of peri-urban areas in most countries. These dynamic areas, subjected to pressure from urban planning, are contributing to the uncoupling of consumption and local agriculture. In this article we study the feasibility of recoupling production and consumption within the agr...
