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The Water Law protects freshwater ecosystems by regulating activities and infrastructure with a potential impact on watercourses, whose legal definition was established in 2015. A research team at INRAE has developed the first national watercourse map. This map reveals disparities in how this definition is applied from one French département (administrative region) to another, to the detriment of small headwater streams - which are often rich in biodiversity - and intermittent streams.

To protect freshwater ecosystems, the Water Act regulates activities and facilities that can impact watercourses, which have been legally defined since 2015. Researchers at INRAE have drawn up the first national map of watercourses, which reveals inequalities between départements in the application of this definition, to the detriment of small streams at the head of basins, often rich in biodiversity, and intermittent streams.

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.

A collaborative effort between the newly established research institute, Paleotechnic, and several national laboratories (INRAE, University of Orléans) has led to the discovery of a dam, a water treatment facility, and a hydraulic elevator, which would have enabled the construction of the Step Pyramid of Saqqara.

As part of a housing development project in Fameck, Inrap is excavating for the first time a Middle Paleolithic (and Pleistocene) occupation in Moselle, 40 years after the Chavelot dig in the Vosges. The dig provides new elements for assessing the place of this region in European settlements. An occasional Neanderthal hunting lodge? The plot of land lies within the plateau formations separating the Moselle and its tributary, the Fensch.

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.

A team of CNRS planetary scientists 1 working in collaboration with astronomers from the University of Montréal has presented first evidence that the temperate exoplanet LHS 1140b could be an ocean world. Over the past few years, the planet, which is located around 48 light-years from the Solar System in the constellation Cetus, has been observed by the Hubble, Spitzer and TESS space telescopes, as well as by the ESPRESSO instrument mounted on the VLT telescope in Chile.

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).

Publication involving a former ENS de Lyon PhD candidate and the EVS laboratory, in the journal Marine Geology . Earliest Evidence of Port-Related lead pollution in Bronze Age Greece First discovery of brown coal in a stratigraphic context at the end of the Bronze Age Lechaion's harbour archaeological chronology pushed back by at least 5 centuries New perspectives on regional economy and trade during the LBA/EIA transition Lechaion in Corinth, Greece, is the largest ancient port in Greece.

The ocean's capacity to store atmospheric carbon dioxide is some 20% greater than the estimates contained in the latest IPCC report 1 . These are the findings of a study to be published in the journal Nature on December 6, 2023, led by an international team including a biologist from the CNRS 2 . The scientists looked at the role played by plankton in the natural transport of carbon from surface waters down to the seabed.

Researchers from INRAE, Universidad del Desarrollo (Chile), University of Geneva and University of Grenoble developed a new method to assess the risk associated with rockfalls in the mountains, taking into account various triggering factors and all the issues exposed. They successfully tested it in the Chilean Andes.

The largest floating ice shelves in the polar ice sheet have lost more than a third of their volume since 1978.

Using a new analysis method for satellite images, an international research team, coordinated by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and INRAE, mapped for the first time annual changes in global forest biomass between 2010 and 2019. Researchers discovered that boreal and temperate forests have become the main global carbon sinks.

The North Alfeo Fault runs across the seafloor at the base of Mount Etna, the tallest and currently most active European volcano, next to an urban area with a population of one million. The Focus project seeks to better understand seismic processes in action and allow for surveillance of movement along the fault.

A newly identified process of natural iron fertilization in the ocean fuels regional CO2 sinks. This was demonstrated by a study published May 25 in Science and co-authored by 25 researchers from the Tonga project. This project was led by two researchers from the IRD and CNRS, with over 90 scientists from 14 French laboratories based in mainland France, New Caledonia, and 6 international universities.

Publication of the LGL-TPE in the journal PNAS on November 21, 2022. CNRS-INSU communication on December 7, 2022. In the 1980s, geochemical observations led researchers to propose a geodynamic model of the mantle's marbled structure. A team of scientists, some of whom are attached to the Laboratory of Geology of Lyon: Earth, Planets, Environment (LGL-TPE, CNRS/ENS de Lyon/Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University), has been working on this model using a seismological perspective.

For the first time, zinc isotope ratios in tooth enamel have been analysed with the aim of identifying the diet of a Neanderthal. Other chemical tracers indicate that this individual did not consume the blood of their prey, but ate the bone marrow without consuming the bones. A new study published on october 17th in the journal PNAS , led by a CNRS researcher, has for the first time used zinc isotope analysis to determine the position of Neanderthals in the food chain.

On February 21, 2021, NASA's Perseverance rover landed in the Jezero Crater on Mars. In October 1 , the rover confirmed the importance of its landing site, showing that Jezero Crater really was the site of a lake 3.6 billion years ago. Perseverance's geological discoveries in the crater's floor are described in four papers published on August 25, 2022 in Science and Science Advances .

Until now, it has been assumed that the oxygenation of the oceans over geological timescales has mainly been driven by atmospheric oxygen levels. However, a new study published in Nature June 27 2022   suggests otherwise. Work by scientists at the Biogeosciences Laboratory (CNRS/UBFC), together with their colleagues at the University of California's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, shows that the movement of tectonic plates has probably contributed to ocean oxygenation.