Some good news from the past and starting year:

• Yohan Sahraoui, Laure Carassou and researchers from Biogeco have published in Land Use Planning the results of their investigations regarding how changes in land use in the Bordeaux conurbation will affect ecological connectivity. They have coupled a spatial network model of ecological connectivity to a participatory modelling approach from social sciences. By doing so, they uncovered that the anticipated impacts on ecological connectivity of urban sprawl and densification are unfortunately quite similar to the worst scenarios for future urban development (!) that their interdisciplinary team could come up with. “Utopian” scenarios that maintained the current level of ecological connectivity required radical changes. We’re hoping that the local city planners will take new steps to seriously mitigate biodiversity losses.

• Valentine Laurent (1st year MSc) has been working with us in Spring 2021 on Odonata diversity in (sub)urban environments, using notably a trait-based approach. She found that (sub)urban Odonata do not have traits which substantially differ from regional communities, and that wastelands can have surprisingly positive impacts on Odonata diversity.

• Frédéric published the first annual survival estimates for the Gyrfalcon, using long-term capture-recapture data. Check out the blog post! – also available in French.

• Coralie and Fred published a paper showing that seed banks can benefit phytoplankton. This will certainly sound surprising to some, but these resistance forms can survive for decades and at times centuries in the coastal sediment. Some have even been found to be viable after millennia! Quite intuitively, being able to `recolonize from the past’ is a feature that greatly helps phytoplankton species to coexist, in spite of biotic interactions and abiotic perturbations.

• Matthieu Paquet just joined us from Sweden to work on the identifiability of dynamic models including interactions within and between species. Matthieu has previously worked at SLU Uppsala on Integrated Population Models (merging capture-recapture, reproduction, and count data) for single-species dynamics, and will use his background to tackle Integrated Community Models. Welcome Matthieu!