SESASA aims at developing a “system of systems (SoS)” for assessing agricultural land-use-and-management-change scenarios and provide adaptive feed-back. SESASA will connect farmer responses to social, economic and climate changes at local scale with planning and policy instruments at national scale. SESASA will explore spatio-temporal opportunities to harmonize conflicts between arable farming, grazing and pastoralism. Our theoretical framework builds on social-ecological systems and considers systemic properties such as emergence effects that arise from a non-predictable amplification of management impacts on the availability of natural resources. Research/ innovation questions the project intends to address: 1. How can social-ecological-systems be operationalized in terms of smart modelling approaches and architectures to enable a highly flexible and low data demanding assessment of the performance of agro-ecological systems? 2. Which adaptation opportunities for arable farming, grazing and pastoralism – using scenarios – are most recommendable in different agro-ecological zones to minder food and water insecurity? 3. How can we transfer such an approach into decision making and consulting? Accounting local land-management practices in large scale simulations is indispensable for understanding complex social-ecological interactions and requires a highly integrative knowledge processing approach based, for instance, on graph-node theories to reflect the complexity of drivers, agents and nature-human interactions of agro-ecosystems. We suggest implementing a multi-disciplinary SoS including the models ECOSERV (France), GISCAME (Germany) and MOWASIA (Burkina Faso) + research on planning and management practices (Burkina Faso, Ghana), environmental assessment (Ghana, Germany) and perceptions of local experts and actors (Burkina Faso, Ghana). This ensemble will be implemented to explore multiple trajectories of agro-ecosystems at nested scales.

Virtual worlds are increasingly used in the entertainment industry to provide users with a unique and extraordinary experience, in which the quality and the extent of the world is central. This quality is usually obtained by resorting massively to artists, which is expensive and has obvious limitations. The goal of the project is to propose high-level techniques to help artists author and create virtual worlds by using a novel data-driven and machine learning approach. This will be done by high-level tools that will support users in their tasks, without any trade-off in the creative pipeline. The project will rely on machine learning methods and will cover a large variety of scene elements (terrains, vegetation, materials). The data will come from various origins (GIS data, from games, simulation, automatic segmentation). The consortium is composed of academics experts in virtual worlds modeling (LIRIS), a video game company (Ubisoft) and experts in vegetation modeling (CIRAD).

Forest are complex social-ecological systems that deliver many contributions to humans and other species. Yet, like most ecosystems on Earth, French forests are increasingly impacted by on-going climate change, which alters their structure, biodiversity and functioning and threatens their renewal. Their sensitivity, and by extension the sensitivity of their contributions, is expected to increase in the next decades. At the same time, there is an increasing demand for the decarbonization of the economy, with a strong demand for forest products and services. As a result, forests are now facing a key challenge: how promoting their ability of carbon sequestration without impacting the other contributions to people, while taking into account their vulnerability to climate change? FISSA will bring elements to answer this question, by simulating forest’s contributions according to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), under both climate change and management scenarios. More precisely, FISSA will aim at assessing the effect of different forest management scenarios and several climate scenarios on forests contributions, and analyzing trade-offs and synergies between contributions within a socio-ecological framework. In FISSA we will thus test how the regionalization of the different forest management changes the balance between the vulnerability to climate change impacts and its mitigation, how the level of management intensification could also threaten other forest contributions to people, and whether tree diversity may improve the resilience of forests socio-ecosystems and their contributions to climate change mitigation and adaptation. To do so, FISSA will rely on the close interaction between the outcomes of sociological analyses and cutting-edge forest models simulations, to provide insights at both local and national levels. First, we will analyze the expectations of the various actors of forest social-ecological systems and consider how they may influence the orientations of forest policies, to establish relevant forest management scenarios and strategies at national and local levels to be used in models simulations (WP1). FISSA will actually focus on three complementary spatial scales: pilot-sites, secondary sites, and national level. Second, we will couple complementary process-based models of forest dynamics and functioning to obtain a tool to provide predictions of forest composition and structure, forest productivity and health, and soil carbon storage. (WP2) at the scale of France and for a set of local sites for which particular stakes are identified in WP1. Third, we will predict how different climate change and management scenarios will affect forest contributions, with a special focus on carbon sequestration (WP3). Simulation outputs will be analyzed under the socio-ecological angle within the framework of the United Nations’ SDGs as well as national policies. They will then be shared with the actors to collect their perceptions and expectations, and – if needed – lead to a revision of management scenarios (WP3). Targeting both basic scientific questions and key applied-science issues, FISSA will benefit from a strong multidisciplinary consortium, including both scientific and non-academic partners, with strong potential for transfer actions. This project will tackle issues corresponding to a strong demand by public policies in Europe and in France, as well as key applied-science issues with strong link to socio-economic and cultural fields. Therefore FISSA aims at disseminating as largely as possible its results, especially to decision-makers and forest actors.

The impacts of severe drought events on ecosystem functions are far from being understood, as are the mechanisms which underlie functional resilience after the disturbance has passed. This topic is of utmost importance in tropical regions, where climate change models forecast significant changes in water availability due to increasing frequency and intensity of drought events. Only a handful of studies have examined how drought can affect multiple functions in tropical systems. Because such studies focused on the immediate outcome of drought (ignoring the recovery and resilience trajectories), we don’t know how organism traits and ecological mechanisms mediate the post-drought trajectory of ecosystem functions. Metacommunity theory predicts that immigration from source patches should prevent extinction in sink populations, but we know nothing of how habitat patch size and distance to source populations interactively mediate ecosystem resilience to drought. The aim of RESILIENCE is to understand how different scales of biological organisation, organisms, functional community structure, metacommunity, and their interactions, drive community re-assembly and multifunctional resilience in neotropical ecosystems, following drought events that range from the current norm to extreme events and predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Our experiments will be conducted in French Guiana. We will manipulate drought and metacommunity dynamics at the level of an entire, spatially-discrete ecosystem (the natural microcosm formed by rainwater-filled leaves of tank bromeliads and their microbial-faunal communities), to separate the roles of in situ recovery (tolerance, resistance forms) versus immigration on the resilience of key ecosystem functions under different drought scenarios. We define tolerance as physiological ability of current life form (e.g., larvae) to withstand drought, whereas resistance refers to a resting stage (e.g., cysts) to allow the population to persist through the dry spell. Desiccation-rehydration experiments will allow us to partition the contributions of tolerance and resistance to resilience. We will also manipulate habitat patch size and isolation, to examine how the interaction between these factors affect ecosystem resilience. Response variables will account for core functions in most ecosystems: detrital decomposition, photosynthetic activity and microbial respiration, and the simultaneous production of these functions or multifunctionality. We expect that modest drought intensities will be resisted by the in situ tolerance traits of species, but once drought intensifies these physiological thresholds will be exceeded and the system will shift to a degraded state. At this point, continuance of the community will be dependent on recolonization from nearby source patches, and therefore metacommunity configuration will become critical. Our specific hypotheses are: (1) Multifunctionality will shift to alternative states at lower drought intensity if source patches are not available to prevent extinctions; (2) as drought intensity increases, the driving factors underlying ecosystem resilience will shift from organism tolerance to resistance, and from functional community structure to metacommunity dynamics; and (3) once we account for the negative effect of distance from source patches on recolonization rates, larger patches will be more attractive to immigrants and will undergo faster resilience than smaller habitat patches. Our findings will be disseminated to scientists, students, stakeholders, and public schools. If we understand the mechanisms that enhance or undermine multifunctional resilience, we can consider how our results will allow forecasting future responses of ecosystems to drought. RESILIENCE comes at a critical point in research on ecological effects of climate change, and will provide a fresh, synthetic approach on how to predict the ecosystem consequences of climate change.

The increase of international trade in recent decades, as well as insufficient control for the transport of exotic species, have resulted in the accidental introduction of many animal and plant species. One of the most significant ecological impacts of introduced species is predation on native species. Predation can indeed act as a major mechanism of species extinction in invaded communities, affecting as a consequence the whole ecosystem functioning. For instance, the introduction of terrestrial platyhelminthes, recognized as superpredators of soil invertebrate fauna, may represent a threat to earthworms and the numerous ecosystem services that they provide. By significantly modifying the physical, chemical and biological properties of the soil profile; earthworms indeed play a key role in determining the functioning and the biodiversity of the whole ecosystem, as they influence the habitat and activities of many other organisms (plants, animals and micro-organisms). The aims of the PLATWORM project are to delineate, and to predict, the consequences that modifications of earthworm communities, under the effect of a new predation pressure, can have on the functioning of the soil ecosystem, in anthropized environment. In France, the presence of 10 potentially invasive Platyhelminthe species has recently been reported. The most common, Obama nungara, a generalist predator of soil invertebrates, is now present in 70 departments. In the PLATWORM project, a comprehensive approach will be developed for the study of the impact on soil functioning of the presence of this introduced species. Fundamental knowledge on the disturbance of biodiversity and the modification of the functioning of the soil ecosystem following the introduction of this predator will be acquired. To achieve its objective, the PLATWORM project propose an innovative multidisciplinary approach combining mesocosm experiments, metagenomics, community ecology, study of soil properties and participatory science. All the biological, ecological and human-related data that will be produced by the project will allow modeling the impact of terrestrial platyhelminthes on soil functioning. The establishment of a field-validated ecosystem model will allow both a broad understanding of the targeted ecosystem and predicting potential long-term trajectories of ecosystems invaded by O. nungara. This will therefore provide key management guidance for mitigation actions.