2024-09-11 13:00:08
Book. Since 2019, the CNRS publications have given a useful voice to “Great objects of research” in a collection of short works where the authors revise their journey and explain their work. After the historian Michelle Perrot or the climate scientist Valérie Masson-Delmotte, it is the scientist Sandra Lavorel, CNRS Gold Medal in 2023, who, in Ecosystems, the common good (CNRS ed., 64 pages, 9 euros), allows us to explore the discipline that helps to create, the work environment, which has become central to face environmental crises.
In the 1990s, scientists proposed the concept of “ecosystem function” to reflect the way in which living environments and the organisms in them contribute to the good health of human societies, for example by reducing seeds or contributing to important carbon or water cycles.
It is in the high altitudes of the Haute-Romanche valley, in the Alps, that Sandra Lavorel has been documenting this precious contribution and the important conditions for its conservation since 2003. In these mountain areas, she carefully maps the propositions, list the species and classify them, not according to their identity but according to their functions: for example the speed with which the leaves of a plant decay or the ability of seeds to disperse. Amazing work, instantly integrated into an open database bringing together data from more than 300,000 plant entities around the world.
At the crossroads of life and society
This information, combined with climate and economic models, makes it possible to compare scenarios for the evolution of important functions of ecosystems, based on land use and temperatures is rising. This model work demonstrates the need for public action. The research director at the CNRS mainly works with the city of Grenoble to imagine the future of alpine meadows based on economic choices, within the complete independence of the market ( The result is “abandonment of mountain agriculture”) and enhanced security.
If the tireless representation of ecosystems is at the forefront to consider the deterioration of the wells of biodiversity, it also illustrates their great potential for restoration, when protective measures are taken. At the intersection of the life sciences and social sciences, his work demonstrates the benefits of the links between academic research and public practice.
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