Biodiversity loss, climate change and the alteration of ecosystem functioning represent major challenges for society and policy makers. The aim of this course is to provide the theoretical and methodological basics essential to understand the causes and consequences of the challenges imposed by global change. The concepts and examples presented during the course will illustrate the complex relationships between biodiversity, ecological processes and human societies, and the need to adopt an interdisciplinary approach (mathematical modelling of a population, physico-chemical properties of soils and vegetation dynamics, human health and air quality, etc.) to address current environmental challenges.
The notion of biodiversity will be at the heart of the lessons. As a first step, this course will present the definition of biodiversity as well as its different biological scales (from gene to community) and facets (functional, phylogenetic, taxonomic, specific diversity).
Then, we will study the relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Biodiversity is structured by the surrounding physico-chemical conditions and influences its environment in return (especially ingenious species). Identifying the role of one or several species and their response(s) to environmental changes is the domain of "functional" ecology, whose basic concepts and tools will be presented during the course.
To conclude this course, we will see how the dependence of human societies on biodiversity and ecological processes can be assessed using the concept of "ecosystem service", i.e. the contribution of biodiversity and ecosystems to the maintenance and well-being of human societies (protection against extreme climatic events, production of food, materials, etc.).
- Profesor: Mouchet Maud