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Windstorms are extreme climatic events: rare occurrences with high environmental and economic costs. INRAE and AgroParisTech researchers used foresight modelling to simulate the effects of windstorms on French forests-important carbon sinks-and the French forestry industry through 2050. In one quarter of simulations, windstorms caused a 24% drop in carbon sequestration.

Publication of the LGL-TPE in the journal Nature Astronomy on May 22, 2024. Communication by CNRS Earth & Space on June 19, 2024. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of the most abundant ices in the Solar System. It has been detected in giant planet atmospheres and on their moons, on and around comets, and even in regions of Mercury, the Moon and Mars.

For nearly ten years, astronomers have been trying to demonstrate the existence of a massive object thought to be orbiting in the outer reaches of the Solar System. Although the hypothesis is widely debated, a recent study claims that the absence of such a body is statistically impossible. Now that Pluto is no longer considered a true planet, the Solar System counts just eight such bodies.

Along with humans, birds are the only permanent bipeds in the animal kingdom to possess an extraordinary sense of balance. How do these direct descendants of the dinosaurs maintain this stability, particularly during their sleep - scientists have recently succeeded in unravelling the mystery.

In freshwater environments, warming and nutrient enrichment are reducing the diversity of freshwater food-webs, whose richness and complexity are essential to the well-being of ecosystems. This is what researchers from INRAE, Oxford University, the University of Sheffield and Savoie Mont Blanc University have demonstrated by combining large-scale data from lakes and rivers in France.

Three scientists from INRAE, the CNRS and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia have coordinated a large-scale international study involving 120 scientists from 27 countries to understand how the plants found in drylands have adapted to these extreme habitats. For 8 years, the teams collected samples from several hundred selected dryland plots across six continents, enabling the analysis of over 1300 sets of observations of 300+ plant species, a first on this scale.

As the world tries to adapt to climate change, a major challenge is accurately predicting local-level meteorological conditions, such as those found in agricultural landscapes. INRAE researchers recently made a significant step forward: using a supercomputer, they simulated a forest plot's micrometeorological conditions in the early morning.

Researchers at INRAE and the National Autonomous University of Mexico have combined flight activity data for honey bees with AI modelling to create a high performing toxicovigilance tool. The results of their study, published in Ecological Informatics, confirm that the tool can alert users to risks to honey bee populations caused by exposure to neurotoxic pesticides.

Genetic diversity is fundamental to the maintenance and resilience of species and ecosystems. In the context of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (CMBKM), of which France is a signatory, an international consortium, including INRAE, Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University and the Conservatoire d'espaces naturels d'Occitanie, has developed and demonstrated the feasibility of using 2 genetic diversity indicators based on existing and available data without the need for DNA.

Conserving genetic diversity is an essential part of maintaining the health and resilience of species and ecosystems. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework is requiring its signatories, among them France, to use two genetic diversity indicators that can be estimated using readily available data that may or may not be DNA based.

It is known that people have been bringing alien bird species onto islands for thousands of years, but how this has shaped the diversity of those species has just been brought to light by a study soon to be published in the journal Ecology Letters. An international team of scientists led by three researchers from the CNRS and Paris-Saclay University 1 has shown that, on most of the 407 islands they considered, humans have a greater impact on alien species diversity than do geographic variables.

A new study, published by scientists from CIRAD and INRAE, provides a state-of-the-art assessment of the risk of Desert Locust invasions in West and North Africa, by analyzing 40 years of field data and climate records. The study reveals that preventive management measures have been successful in countering the favorable effects of climate change on outbreaks of the pest.

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are designed to ensure the long-term conservation of marine ecosystems and the services they provide to human societies; however, only a third of these areas are capable of offering real protection on a global scale. These are the findings of a study, carried out by scientists from the CNRS 1 as part of an international research team, to be published on 9 May in Conservation Letters .

A new study involving INRAE reveals the speed at which bird flu is spreading in live poultry markets in Asia. Scientists from the One Health Poultry Hub program have modeled the spread of avian flu in these markets, integrating for the first time biological data collected in the field. They focused their study on the H9N2 avian flu virus, which is not very virulent for poultry, but represents a major risk in the spread and evolution of the disease.

How can we know what chickens are feeling? An INRAE research team were able to uncover various degrees of redness on chickens' faces depending on their emotional state, while, at the same time, demonstrating that the skin of chickens that were used to humans stayed lighter in colour, thereby indicating a calmer state when humans were nearby.

Aerial view of slash-and-burn agriculture in the state of Amazonas, western Brazil (September 2022). On our planet, everything is interconnected, from terrestrial and marine ecosystems and biodiversity to ice sheets, rivers and oceans. But a recent report reveals that the dynamics of these different systems is being destabilised by human activities to such an extent that they are reaching points of no return.

An international consortium of paleontologists, geologists and biologists describes the discovery of fossil assemblages spanning the last 130,000 years beneath the Ariane 6 rocket launch site in Kourou, French Guiana. The consortium, coordinated by scientists from the Montpellier Institute of Evolutionary Sciences (Université de Montpellier/CNRS/IRD) and the Université de Guyane/Géosciences Montpellier, includes Frédéric Quillévéré from the Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon : Terre, Planètrs, Environnement (LGL-TPE, CNRS/Université Lyon 1/ENS de Lyon/Université Jean Monnet).

INRAE, Bordeaux Sciences Agro, CNRS, Université de Bordeaux and Université de Bourgogne have analysed trends to come in current and developing winegrowing regions around the world to adapt wine production to climate change. The results of the study, published in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment, show that some 90% of coastal and low-altitude regions in southern Europe and California may no longer be able produce good wine in economically sustainable conditions by the end of the century if global warming exceeds +2°C.

What is the origin of genetic diversity in plants? Can new mutations acquired during growth be passed on to seeds? INRAE scientists, in collaboration with CIRAD and the CNRS, have used the French Guiana forest as the setting for their research, leading to a series of discoveries on this fundamental question in biology.

The scientific community has been sounding the alarm over the effects of pesticide use on human health and the disappearance of numerous species in agricultural environments for half a century. As early as 1962, Rachel Carson's pioneering work predicted "silent springs" caused by the decline of birds, the collateral victims of pesticides via the poisoning of environments and the disappearance of insects.