Updates from the current year

• Matthieu Paquet has now been recruited by CNRS as a permanent researcher. Congrats Matthieu! He will be based for the foreseeable future in Moulis, Ariège, at the SETE. We’ve got a preprint out with Matthieu that evaluates how multispecies Integrated Population Models perform in absence – in addition to presence – of species interactions, and if the framework is robust to process stochasticity. It is soon-to-be published at PCI/PeerCommunity Journal.

• Gaël Bardon (MSc student 2020) and Frédéric published a paper on coexistence in stage-structured contexts in Bulletin of Mathematical Biology. The paper shows, among other things, that scenarios where competitive exclusion is predicted in unstructured models allow coexistence in stage-structured models, and that it does not require complex life histories (e.g. metamorphosis). Although the mechanism is robust to parameter perturbations for species pairs, we found that it is unlikely to be a key driver of species-rich community persistence. We’re following up on these models from a statistical perspective with Matthieu using the Integrated Population Model framework.

• We organised in Bordeaux a workshop on Integrated Population Models identifiability. A paper will follow, more on that soon-ish.

• Mélanie Bertrand (MSc) worked with Frédéric for her internship on butterfly diversity in (sub)urban environments. Butterfly diversity and abundance were found to decline with soil sealing levels, but not steeply, and prairial amount had the largest positive impact. This project benefited from a high-resolution land-use map of the Bordeaux conurbation produced by i-Sea in collaboration with us. We can now quantify the influence of private gardens and other small green elements, even in the most urbanised areas (see below). Follow-up coming in 2024.

• Thomas Besognet (1st year MSc) has been working on replicating a paper by Korpela et al. Proceedings B 2014 on vole population dynamics. We obtained different results than the original paper, but given what is published at the moment - see this great study by Gould et al., to which participated Matthieu – it should not be too surprising. The reproduction of the vole dynamics paper is not finalized, please do get in touch if interested.