Research expertise
Interdisciplinarity in environmental studies & sustainable development: Aquatic ecosystems offer precious services to our societies and some of them are created and/or restaured by humans. A global and interdisciplinary vision of the development and management of these systems (i.e., estuaries, harbors, marinas, reservoirs, protected marine areas, etc.) is needed. The experience of studying over two decades anthroposystems such as large estuaries and their associated infrastructure (i.e., harbors, dikes, artificial island, etc) and ecosystems (i.e., wetlands, natural reserves, etc.) can be transferred to almost all coastal areas experiencing economic and demographic development.
Aquaculture, marine biomass valorisation and biotechnology: Aquaculture is crucial in food security program around the world and its development is increasing in all sectors. Moreover the valorisation of produced biomass (i.e., micro-algae, plankton or seaweeds) in different industrial sectors via the most advanced biorefinery technologies has a great potential for the blue economy revolution. By developping pre-industrial pilots to produce micro-alage and zooplankton groups (mainly copepods) at large scale and creating new interfaces several reasearch and/or industrial results have been obtained.
Ecology & Evolution: 1- Understanding the role of the diversity of life (morphology, behaviour, strategy, traits,…) in the functionning of aquatic systems from small to large scales (i.e., climate change studies). 2- Combining field observations, experimentation under controlled conditions and modelling to study the complexity of the population dynamics of aquatic organisms with a focus on zooplankton (i.e., copepods).
Ecotoxicology & risk assessment: 1- Use of copepods as biological models for aquatic ecotoxicology and also developping sentinels for water quality. 2- Development of an integrated approach to study the effects of different pollutants on planktonic food chain: use of genomics, molecular tools, biomarkers, life traits, multigenerations responses and bioindicators.
Numerical Ecology and Computer Modelling: 1- Artificial Intelligence and Individual-Based Modelling applied to biological systems using Object-Oriented models and Multi-Agent Systems. 2- Developping new multivariate mapping methods for analysing complex databases in environmental research.