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June 1986 - present
Publications
Publications (603)
The Eurasian Stone-curlew (Burhinus oedicnemus) is a declining and threatened species, yet its migration and wintering strategies are little documented. Here, we used GPS trackers to collect accurate data on this species' migration routes, stopovers, flight altitude, and speed, and identified the wintering sites of 32 individuals from a western Eur...
Buller's albatross Thalassarche bulleri is generally considered to comprise two subspecies: T. b. bulleri, which breeds on islands south of the South Island, New Zealand; and T. b. platei, which nests on the Three Kings Islands, off the northern tip of of the North Island, and on outlying islets of the Chatham Islands east of New Zealand. Although...
Reducing agricultural inputs is necessary for sustainable farming but raises concerns over yields and farmers’ income. We used large-scale experimental trials on cereal fields in western France for the period 2022–2023 to assess the effects of input reductions on yields and gross margins under real farming conditions. The trials, co-designed with f...
Intensive use of synthetic pesticides in conventional agriculture may harm non-target organisms through sublethal effects on life-history traits. Farmland birds are exposed throughout their life cycle, but the fate of non-persistent pesticide mixtures in wild birds remains unknown. In this study, we investigated changes in pesticide contamination l...
Transdisciplinary research in sustainability science (TRSS) inherently involves a diversity of research actors and societal actors performing a variety of roles, but it is often unclear which actors perform which roles. This paper contributes to filling this knowledge gap by examining a sample of TRSS projects selected from a French research infras...
Pesticide contamination is often cited as a key factor in the global decline of farmland birds. However, the majority of studies on pesticide exposure in non-target fauna are not representative of what happens in nature because they are limited to artificial conditions. The aim of this study was to define and compare, for the first time, pesticide...
Biomonitoring of persistent pesticides in birds of prey has been carried out for decades, but few studies have investigated their relevance for the monitoring of non-persistent pesticides. Herein, we determined the contamination patterns of multiple pesticides in Montagu’s harrier (Circus pygargus) chicks in an intensive farming area of southwester...
Farmers' pro-environmental action is substantially influenced by various stakeholders from their business and social environment. Recent studies recommend actively involving influential stakeholders in agri-environmental initiatives, information or media campaigns. While it has been argued that farmers' perceptions towards these stakeholders can he...
Human activities have led to the contamination of all environmental compartments worldwide, including bird species. In birds, both the environment and maternal transfer lead to high inter-brood variability in contamination levels of pollutants, whereas intra-brood variability is generally low. However, most existing studies focused on heavy metals...
Biomonitoring of persistent pesticides in birds of prey has been carried out for decades, but few studies have investigated their relevance for the monitoring of non-persistent pesticides. Herein, we determined the contamination patterns of multiple pesticides in Montagu’s harrier ( Circus pygargus ) chicks in an intensive farming area of southwest...
Gadfly petrels Pterodroma spp. are among the most threatened bird taxa. Conservation interventions have been successfully developed and applied for some gadfly petrel species, but a substantial gap remains in conservation science for this group in the tropical Pacific Ocean. The Vanuatu Petrel Pterodroma [cervicalis] occulta is an ideal exemplar to...
Global demand for vegetable oil is projected to expand to 28 Mt by 2028. Oilseed rape (OSR) is the predominant oilseed crop in Europe. Its nutritional value is determined by seed oil content and fatty acids (FAs) composition. Insect pollination increases seed oil content, however, its benefit on FAs composition remains unknown. In this study, we ad...
Nature-based solutions (NBSs) can ensure food production while providing environmental benefits, but there is little scientific knowledge about their economically efficient use. This study fills this gap by investigating NBSs in an agricultural production model calibrated on empirical data. We propose an original framework based on the framework in...
Natural pest and weed regulation are essential for agricultural production, but the spatial distribution of natural enemies within crop fields and its drivers are mostly unknown. Using 28 datasets comprising 1204 study sites across eight Western and Central European countries, we performed a quantitative synthesis of carabid richness, activity dens...
Buller's albatross Thalassarche bulleri is generally considered to comprise two subspecies: T. b. bulleri, which breeds on islands south of the South Island, New Zealand; and T. b. platei, which nests on the Three Kings Islands, off the northern tip of of the North Island, and on outlying islets of the Chatham Islands east of New Zealand. Although...
Increasing landscape heterogeneity has been suggested to be an important strategy to strengthen natural pest control in crops, especially through enhancing the amount of seminatural habitats. Increasing crop diversity is also a promising strategy to complement or replace seminatural habitat when seminatural habitat is scarce. However, their relativ...
Metabarcoding approaches are powerful tools to unravel trophic relationships between predators and prey. To apply metabarcoding analyses on invertebrate gut contents, specimens must be well preserved from DNA degradation, thus the trapping method should be selected accordingly. Dry pitfall traps are commonly assumed to provide a better DNA preserva...
Agricultural intensification is one of the main threats to biodiversity. Farmland bird specialists such as Montagu's harrier, Circus pygargus, are particularly at risk and declining. Conventional farming (CF) production systems usually involve landscape homogenisation, mechanisation, and the use of synthetic pesticides that may have direct and indi...
While many studies have illustrated the decline of animal populations—particularly of farmland birds—the
statistical analyses, design, and protocols used have raised some concerns and criticism. Using a 27-year dataset
(1996–2022) based on recording the number of skylarks (Alauda arvensis) at 160 longitudinal count points, our
study confronts two a...
Sustainability science is an emerging scientific field that aims to address the environmental problems facing contemporary societies. This article explores the relationship between the wickedness level of these problems and the research stances and methods scientists use to address them. It reviews a sample of 17 research projects addressing divers...
Palearctic migrants wintering in Africa commonly use several sites throughout the winter, a strategy known as ‘itinerancy’. In this way, migrants track spatiotemporal variation in resources. Despite the importance of this strategy for migratory landbirds, we still lack detailed understanding of how variation in environmental conditions affects site...
Plastic pollution is distributed patchily around the world’s oceans. Likewise, marine organisms that are vulnerable to plastic ingestion or entanglement have uneven distributions. Understanding where wildlife encounters plastic is crucial for targeting research and mitigation. Oceanic seabirds, particularly petrels, frequently ingest plastic, are h...
Agricultural expansion and intensification have boosted global food production but have come at the cost of environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. Biodiversity-friendly farming that boosts ecosystem services, such as pollination and natural pest control, is widely being advocated to maintain and improve agricultural productivity while saf...
Nest predation is the main cause of reproductive failure, particularly in ground-nesting birds on farmlands. Understanding the links between nest predation and habitat change can help design effective management schemes to constrain the negative impact of predation pressure on birds. However, the mechanisms underlying the relationships between land...
Wild bees are known to be efficient pollinators of wild plants and cultivated crops and they are essential ecosystem service providers. However, wild bee populations have been suffering from significant declines in the last decades mainly due to the use of agrochemicals. Within this framework, we aimed to characterize wild bees' pollination spectru...
Agricultural expansion and intensification are key drivers of biodiversity decline. There is mounting evidence that modern farming impacts the effectiveness of protected areas as one of the key instruments of biodiversity conservation through, for example, eutrophication, pesticide emissions or increasing access to remote areas [1]. This is increas...
Wild bees are known to be efficient pollinators of wild plants and cultivated crops and they are essential ecosystem service providers. However, wild bee populations have been suffering from significant declines in the last decades mainly due to the use of agrochemicals. Within this framework, we aimed to characterize wild bees pollination spectrum...
Metabarcoding approaches are powerful tools to unravel trophic relationships between predators and prey. To apply metabarcoding analyses on invertebrate gut contents, specimens must be well preserved from DNA degradation, thus the trapping method should be selected accordingly. Dry pitfall traps are commonly assumed to provide a better DNA preserva...
Neonicotinoids (neonics) are the most widely used insecticides worldwide and are considered to be of low risk to non-target organisms such as vertebrates. Further, they are reported to be rapidly excreted and metabolized, reducing their potential toxicity. Nevertheless, growing evidence of adverse effects of neonics on farmland bird species raise q...
Many agrifood systems around the world can be characterized as unsustainable. Research is increasingly required to inform the necessary radical transformations of the ways we produce, process, transport, and consume food. This article presents the research approach and methods of an ongoing project carried out at a long-term social–ecological resea...
Adult sex ratios (ASRs) have proved to correlate with population trends, which make them potential useful indicators of a species' population trajectory and conservation status. We analysed ASRs and proportion of juveniles in flocks of an endangered steppe bird, the Little Bustard Tetrax tetrax, using surveys made during the non-breeding period in...
Over the last 50 years, farmland bird populations have declined steeply in Europe and North America. Reintroduction or reinforcement for populations unable to self-maintain are popular management tools to overcome extinction risk through captive rearing and release. However, released birds tend to have lower survival rates than their wild conspecif...
Knowledge gaps regarding the potential role of pesticides in the loss of agricultural biodiversity worldwide and mixture-related issues hamper proper risk assessment of unintentional impacts of pesticides, rendering essential the monitoring of wildlife exposure to these compounds. Free-ranging mammal exposure to legacy (Banned and Restricted: BRPs)...
For decades, we have observed a major biodiversity crisis impacting all taxa. Avian spe- cies have been particularly well monitored over the long term, documenting their declines. In particular, farmland birds are decreasing worldwide, but the contribution of pesticides to their decline remains controversial. Most studies addressing the effects of...
Whether dark-morph Herald Petrel Pterodroma heraldica exists or not has been debated for many years. We summarise previous contributions on the subject, provide indisputable evidence of the dark morph, describe its plumage based on museum specimens and live birds, highlight differences between dark, light and intermediate morphs, and enumerate char...
Pollination is essential for many crops since 70% of the world's cultivated plants depend on pollinators for their production. Floral resources within cultivated areas, especially those produced by flowering crops such as oilseed rape, are known to have a positive effect on wild pollinators. Nevertheless, little is known about the contribution of o...
Conventional farming has been implicated in global biodiversity loss, with many farmland birds in decline. Organic farming is often considered a more ecological alternative since it generally hosts greater faunal diversity. To date, the impact of conventional agriculture on the decline in avian species has mainly been assessed through the lens of b...
Context
Recognized as a critical ecosystem service in farmland, pollination is threatened by the decline of pollinators, notably due the homogenization of the landscape and the decline of floral resources. However, there is still a limited understanding of the interplay between landscape features and the pulses of floral resources provided by mass-...
SHOWCASE’s first step is to create a European network of local Experimental Biodiversity Areas (EBAs), that will be used to co-develop (though to varying degrees) and test successful strategies for better integrating biodiversity into farming. EBAs are located across a wide range of agro-ecosystems and represent farming systems undergoing both inte...
This report was researched and written between April and December 2021 by researchers at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), with support from partners at the University of Reading (UK), De Vlinderstichting (Netherlands), and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, France). The report consists of a review of existing...
Numerous toxicological studies have shown that ingestion of pesticides can induce physiological stress in breeding birds, with adverse consequences on egg laying parameters and offspring quality through parental effects. However, previous studies do not mimic current levels of pesticide residues in typical landscapes, and they do not consider poten...
The last century has seen a steep decline in biodiversity, and anthropization is considered one of the major drivers of this decline. Anthropogenic disturbances, due to human presence and/or activities, may be perceived as chronic stressors by wildlife and potentially lead to deleterious effects on traits related to fitness. The main objective of t...
The slow adoption by the agricultural sector of practices to promote biodiversity are thought to originate from three interrelated issues. First, we know little about which incentives effectively motivate farmers to integrate biodiversity into daily farm management. Second, few studies so far have produced evidence that biodiversity-based approache...
Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) translocated into the nuclear genome (numt), when co-analysed with genuine mtDNA, could plague phylogeographic studies. To evaluate numt-related biases in population genetics parameters in birds, which are prone to accumulating numts, we targeted the mitochondrial mt-cytb gene. We looked at 13 populations of Audubon's shea...
Agricultural intensification tends to maximize provisioning services at the expense of regulating, cultural and supporting ecosystem services (ES). Enhancing agroecosystem sustainability requires both individual and collective solutions, but these are particularly difficult to design and implement since knowledge is lacking and ES may be considered...
Pollination and pest control are two major ecological functions sustaining crop yield. In insect‐pollinated crops, previous studies have revealed that an increase in resources and habitats in landscapes can increase pest control by natural enemies as well as insect pollination by pollinators. However, data have been lacking that simultaneously cons...
Many types of guidance documents inform conservation by providing practical recommendations for the management of species and habitats. To ensure effective decisions are made, such guidance should be based upon relevant and up-to-date evidence. We reviewed conservation guidance for mitigation and management of species and habitats in the United Kin...
Although Glyphosate-based herbicides are often marketed as environmentally friendly and easily biodegradable, its bioavailability and risks to wildlife raise significant concerns. Among non-target organisms, earthworms which live in close contact with the soil can be directly exposed to pesticides and harmed. We investigated soil contamination and...
This review provides support for the role of both macro- and micro-scale factors driving habitat selection by the little bustard. At a regional scale, little bustard distribution shows a clear relationship with temperature-related variables, but also a strong conspecific attraction and a tendency to philopatry at a local scale, making it especially...
We present evidence that confirms the streaked Fregetta lineata is a
valid extant species that breeds on New Caledonia and endorse the vernacular name New Caledonian Storm Petrel. We review taxonomic deliberations over the historic five ‘Pealea’ streaked storm petrel specimens. Three belong to the recently rediscovered New Zealand Storm Petrel F. m...
Predation is a major evolutionary force in animal ecology. Mechanisms by which prey coloration provides camouflage has been widely studied. However, predator response to prey camouflage and concealment has received less attention. Understanding vegetation structure effect on depredation success could help managers design strategies to mitigate the...
In this closing chapter, we synthesize the most relevant results presented in this volume and discuss research and conservation prospects for the little bustard. Research should focus on unexplored areas of little bustard biology and ecology, such as sensorial perception, physiological trade-offs related to sexual selection and reproductive investm...
Despite conservation efforts made over three decades and the improvements in protection status at different levels (global, European, national and regional), the current situation of the little bustard has not improved. Increased knowledge on the species’ biology, and projects aimed at improving its conservation status, such as the designation of p...
In this chapter, we focus mainly on the behavioural ecology of the little bustard (i.e. how behaviour relates to ecology and evolution), with particular emphasis on breeding behaviour, sexual selection and mating systems, as well as their relevance for little bustard conservation. We discuss the evolutionary forces that drive the species’ lekking b...
The little bustard is distributed over an extensive Palearctic range from north-western Africa and Iberia to central Asia, encompassing France, Italy, southern Russia and the Middle East. Over such a vast region, it occupies natural grass steppes, pastured grasslands and cereal farmland, avoiding extreme climatic conditions. Nowadays, two main dist...
The little bustard Tetrax tetrax is one of the smallest members of the family Otididae, and has many remarkable life history traits, in its anatomy, biology and ecology. Some of them are shared with other bustard species, but others are unique to the little bustard. In this chapter we first describe plumage and biometry. Moreover, we present and ex...
We summarize what is known about the variation in little bustard (Tetrax tetrax) vital parameters across its distribution range, regarding densities, breeding phenology, nesting and brooding, breeding success and sex ratio, as well as chick and adult survival. Breeding densities are highly variable, but generally higher in non-intensified farmland...
Little bustard seasonal movements are complex. Besides the long known fully long-distance migratory populations (i.e. those of western France, Russia, and Central Asia), there are also others fully migratory that perform shorter migrations, such as many from northern Spain, or partially migratory, such as those from central Spain. Moreover, there a...
Seventy five percent of the world's food crops benefit from insect pollination. Hence, there has been increased interest in how global change drivers impact this critical ecosystem service. Because standardized data on crop pollination are rarely available, we are limited in our capacity to understand the variation in pollination benefits to crop y...
The use of pesticides in agriculture to protect crops against pests and diseases generates environmental contamination. The atmospheric compartment contributes to their dispersion at different distances from the application areas and to the exposure of organisms in untreated areas through dry and wet deposition. A multiresidue analytical method usi...
Little bustard populations have declined precipitously in many regions and countries of the western Palearctic, but they can also grow quite rapidly when conditions are favourable, reaching high densities from very low numbers in relatively few years. A few documented cases indeed indicate a marked exponential growth phase before they level off due...
The little bustard is a threatened Palearctic steppe bird. Though the species is still abundant in several regions of its distribution range, both general and regional populations show worrying declining trends. The causes of its decline are well documented and mainly attributable to major changes in farmland landscapes, which are currently intensi...
In this chapter, we review the way captive breeding of the little bustard is currently being carried out. Indeed, among the various conservation strategies that have been tried to reverse bustard declines, captive breeding, with reintroduction or reinforcement of local populations (“supportive breeding”), has commonly been used. After a brief revie...