History, environment and the legacy of biodiversity
Why is biodiversity distributed the way it is? Through the PhyloAlps consortium and other international collaborations, I study how past climatic cycles like the Pleistocene glaciations in particular, shaped the assembly of mountain "sky island" floras, and how socio-economic and environmental conditions shape where biodiversity ends up being protected today. This work combines phylogenetics, macroecology and conservation planning to understand what is at stake, and where.
Spatial networks: structuring biodiversity across Europe
Biodiversity is more than a list of species, it is a web of interactions. I develop spatial network ecology approaches to map how trophic interactions between European vertebrates vary across the continent, using large interaction databases such as the TetraEU metaweb. This lets us go beyond species richness to ask how interaction diversity, food-web structure and ecosystem functioning are distributed in space, and how they respond to land-use intensification and other pressures.
Biotic interactions from the ground up: the ORCHAMP observatory
In 2016 I launched ORCHAMP, a long-term observation network monitoring biodiversity and ecosystem functioning along elevation gradients in the French Alps, Corsica and the Pyrenees. Combining vegetation surveys, environmental DNA metabarcoding, and acoustic and camera-trap sensors, ORCHAMP lets us reconstruct soil food webs and study how plant-soil feedbacks, microbial activity and trophic networks structure biodiversity at fine scale, and how they shift with climate and land-use change. More on the observatory itself on the Monitoring page.
Responses to global change: scenarios, threats and connectivity
With the IPBES scenarios and models community, I contribute to global assessments of how land-use and climate change will affect biodiversity and ecosystem services through 2050. Closer to home, I study how anthropogenic pressures suc as direct exploitation and agricultural intensification reshape European food webs, and how protected-area networks can be made more connected and resilient, in France and across the Alps.
Looking ahead: 2026 and beyond
Since January 2026 I have been director of the Laboratoire d'Ecologie Alpine, and I am coordinating Dynabiod, an 8-year, €45M PEPR (2026–2034) dedicated to understanding and predicting biodiversity dynamics, together with Emmanuelle Porcher and Rodolphe Rougerie. Within this programme, my own research is organised around three objectives:
- Multi-trophic assemblages and multi-functionality in space and time: using ORCHAMP's expanding dataset to understand what drives the spatiotemporal structure of multi-trophic biodiversity, and how it feeds back on ecosystem functioning.
- Causal and predictive approaches to biodiversity dynamics: moving from correlative species distribution models toward causal, spatio-temporal frameworks able to detect and attribute biodiversity change, in support of the EU Habitats Directive and restoration policy.
- Next-generation biodiversity predictions and scenarios: integrating dispersal limitation, biotic interactions and deep learning into models of European vertebrate assemblages, to anticipate how food webs will reorganise under future climate and land-use change, and inform conservation planning.