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A few words from Denis Couvet, President of the FRB, and Nicolas Mouquet, Scientific Director of CESAB

The CESAB – Centre for the Synthesis and Analysis of Biodiversity – is an original, innovative program of the FRB, internationally recognized thanks to the work of an entire team and the support of the founding members of the FRB and the Ministry in charge of research. It provides researchers with a space and time to contribute to addressing the challenges related to biodiversity loss and to implement transformative change. The complexity of these challenges has led the FRB and its board of directors to focus on intermediation, which means connecting knowledge, researchers, and research with stakeholders and society. Innovation is also needed in this area so that knowledge circulates and is embraced by both public and private decision-makers. We can envision the FRB being a driving force in accelerating this flow of knowledge, particularly through the projects funded or hosted by the CESAB, which produce groundbreaking and highly relevant knowledge. This is because the young researchers recruited come from diverse backgrounds and countries, because the project leaders at CESAB are top-level researchers, because the FRB encourages translating these findings into societal issues, and because of its unique position in the research world. Its links with stakeholders make the FRB and its CESAB a laboratory where innovation in science-based messaging is fostered. Next December, two major reports will be published by the IPBES: the first on transformative change, and the second on the Biodiversity Nexus, which includes biodiversity, food, climate, water, and health. It will be interesting to explore how the projects and research results published within the CESAB framework contribute to the intermediation of the key messages from these reports.

Denis Couvet, President of the FRB and Professor at the MNHN

We are at a key stage in the trajectory of the CESAB, which is now asserting itself as a major player in biodiversity research. We have reached true maturity, with the stabilization of numerous research groups (over 30 active groups in 2024; 500 researchers involved) producing scientific syntheses of remarkable scope. This positive dynamic also extends to our postdoctoral researchers, several of whom have secured research positions, such as Aurore Receveur from the MAESTRO group, now a research scientist at IRD, Kevin Hoeffner from the LANDWORM group, now a research scientist at INRAE, and Aaron Sexton from the NAVIDIV group, now an assistant professor at Cornell University. Congratulations to them!

At the same time, we launched the CESABinars, a new format of virtual exchanges that has been very successful. These webinars provide a platform where our researchers can share their progress and engage with the international scientific community, further strengthening our network and impact. We are also organizing an international conference in Montpellier in December with the FISHGLOB group, “Fish Biodiversity Facing Global Change.” Finally, we will be welcoming a new data scientist dedicated to the groups formed through the Synthesis call “Human Pressures and Impacts on Terrestrial Biodiversity,” in partnership with MTECT and OFB, where more than 10 groups are creating a true ecosystem within the CESAB. The coming months promise to be just as exciting, with the selection of new groups as part of our 2024 General Call for Synthesis Projects. But it will be in 2025 that we reach a new milestone with the launch of “IdeaShare,” an innovative project call format designed to stimulate creativity and explore new research avenues.

This positive momentum is made possible thanks to the FRB team dedicated to the CESAB, the true driving force of our center. Their expertise, dedication, and passion are at the heart of our success. Thank you to them! We invite you to follow these exciting developments and continue to actively participate in the life of the CESAB.

Nicolas Mouquet, Scientific Director of the CESAB and Research Director at CNRS

Editorial

Faced with the booming of environmental challenges, the need to carry out rigorous and independent synthesis on biodiversity data has never been so high. With CESAB, the Foundation for Biodiversity Research is proud to offer a place where this synthesis is made possible, with the support of its founding members. We can now provide the scientific community with regular calls for proposals, combining “classical” SYNTHESIS calls and DATASHARE calls. The latter opened in 2023 and has proved very popular among the scientific community, once again showing its maturity regarding the importance of bringing together open access biodiversity databases to the biggest number.

We’d also like to celebrate the success of Sandra Lavorel, former member of FRB’s scientific council and member of CESAB DIVGRASS group, who recently won the prestigious CNRS gold medal, and Lucie Mahaut, post-doc for the FREE2 group, and winner of the young researcher award for the French society of ecology and evolution. These prizes are showcasing the cutting edge biodiversity research carried out in France, the maturity level of its scientific community and its recognition by the most regarded scientific bodies, an excellence to which FRB and its CESAB, are contributing.

Finally, FRB’s and CESAB’s heads would like to address their warmest wishes to the whole of CESAB’s team, which constitutes the buzzing heart of our center. Their expertise, engagement and passion, contribute to making CESAB a dynamic and innovative place for biodiversity research: they are the pillars of our successes and advances. To all, huge thanks for your constant work and engagement in our mission. Finally, we’d like to warmly welcome Maija Mikkola, who recently joined our administrative team, welcome Maija!

Together, the FRB and its CESAB, thanks to the continuous support and its founding members and partners, will continue its mission and provide the scientific community with the direct and indirect means to advance biodiversity synthesis, which is key to the wider community of stakeholders. The key role of data synthesis and biodiversity knowledge makes CESAB more relevant than ever.

A word from Claire SALOMON, CESAB’s deputy director

Since its creation in 2010 within the Foundation for Biodiversity Research (I was there!), CESAB has passed several milestones. Firstly seen as a non-identified, yet relevant, object by some in the biodiversity research community, CESAB appeared very abstract to others. The first few groups who stayed at CESAB sometimes doubted themselves of the added-value of gathering in “one place, one time for biodiversity research”. Yet, results were quick to emerge and far beyond our hopes! New networks were created, young researchers acquired an international experience, not to mention all the publications at the cutting edge of research. The biodiversity crisis and IPBES have also, unfortunately, shed light on the relevance of synthesis centers, increasing the appeal of the industry and stakeholders. The number of co-funding opportunities, requests and projects grew from year to year, bringing closer together stakeholders and the scientific community and vice versa.

From the 4 initial CESAB groups, we have now reached 30 today, corresponding to a community of 450 researchers of all nationalities spending two weeks a year at CESAB offices. To ensure the best possible working conditions during the entire length of the projects, CESAB is necessarily run by teams from the FRB in Montpellier and Paris, with a new administrative support this year to maintain the same quality of work. CESAB is also a cohort of post-docs, and will welcome four new members at the start of the academic year within the groups ACOUCENE, BIOFOREST, FOOD-WEBS and IMAPCTS. And to keep all this work consistent, CESAB’s scientific committee keeps an oversight and anticipation of the scientific work conducted, the administrative council of the Foundation and its funding members drive the development of the center and give us the means to act via a wide variety of calls for proposals: from the DATASHARE to OPEN calls, not to mention targeted calls.

A word from Nicolas MOUQUET, CESAB’s scientific director

The year of 2022 has been particularly prosperous for the CESAB. We have:

• Gained in maturity. After the move to Montpellier in 2019, we’ve explored several patterns for the synthesis groups with news partners. This has enabled us to considerably increase the number of active groups from 8 in 2019 to 28 in 2023. We are now working on consolidating this model to make it self-sustaining in the long-run.
• Started up again with in person meetings. The COVID period has allowed us to improve our ability to guide groups in their online work, but also to see the limits of what is conceivable online. Biodiversity data synthesis is a human adventure above all, made of contacts and surprises, which mostly take place when groups gather and live together during an entire week!
• Renewed the scientific council of the CESAB, which has very quickly been involved in the assessment of the applications for the call for proposals.
• Finally, we’ve experimented the setup of a new call for proposals, the Datashare, which focuses on the gathering of biodiversity data and should be reconducted in 2023.

I am convinced that 2023 will be a pivotal year for us to reach another stepping stone in our development, with initiatives already in preparation, and, I hope, the realisation of a joint call for proposals with several synthesis centres supported by Biodiversa+.

In the past four years since the arrival of the CESAB in Montpellier, more than 6 million euros have been secured for the synthesis of data on biodiversity, thereby allowing 474 academics to work in the best possible conditions.

In addition to the synthesis groups, we organise three annual workshops from which 115 PhD students and post-docs have benefitted. In 2023, a new workshop will be introduced on artificial intelligence and biodiversity.

This enthusiasm is possible thanks to the unconditional support of the FRB, its founding members, our partners and the FRB staff involved in the CESAB, whose professionalism and efficiency most often go hand in hand with benevolence and cheerfulness! I thank them dearly for what they bring to the CESAB with its scientific community in particular and biodiversity in general.

Happy new year 2023!

A word from Verena TRENKEL and François MASSOL, co-presidents of CESAB scientific committee

The 22 members of the new CESAB Scientific Committee (CS) have recently started their work for a four-year term. We are honored to lead this multidisciplinary (and parity!) committee as co-presidents. This is the first time that the CESAB CS is led by a co-chair and we intend to demonstrate that two co-chairs are more than the sum of two. We would like to start this mandate by thanking the CS members for their trust and the FRB for the freedom and the human and financial means made available to the CS to carry out efficiently the evaluation and monitoring of projects.

Our co-presidency comes at a time when the support of the FRB, the founding members and the collaboration with other funders allow CESAB to expand its role as a catalyst for science and international collaborations. 22 projects are underway at CESAB and many more are to come. The dynamics of the projects at CESAB and its partnerships with other institutions around the world, largely driven by its director Nicolas Mouquet, is a sign of good health and we are proud to be able to contribute to it in the four years to come. The international training courses offered by CESAB, notably on reproducibility, the use of theories and meta-analyses in ecology and environmental sciences, are also the mark of a stronger involvement of CESAB in the scientific ecology landscape. Finally, other CESAB activities, such as hosting researchers on sabbatical or conference days around a project, also contribute to CESAB’s influence in the context of research on biodiversity and the environment, both in France and internationally.

The CS is currently following the 2022 CESAB call for proposals which will allow, at the end of the evaluation procedure, three new projects to gather and compare their data and ideas. Other calls for projects are already open, including an FRB-MTE-OFB call “Impacts on Biodiversity in the Anthropocene” and an FRB-TULIP-PNDB-BiodivOc call “Datashare”. As in previous years, CESAB will fund about 15 projects that will contribute to building scientific consensus on a large number of crucial issues in view of the current climate and ecological crisis. To meet the challenges posed by the Agenda 2030 and its 17 sustainable development goals, the contributions of CESAB projects will be needed.

Without wishing to give away too much about the program of the future CS meetings, and beyond the management of calls for projects, we can already announce that the CS will be thinking about new ideas to contribute to the advancement of science, based on the synthesis of data, models, concepts… One of our wishes is also to create more opportunities to disseminate the results of Cesab projects to the public. Let’s hope that the next four years of the CS will allow us to work in this direction.

We wish you all a good start to the new school year and look forward to seeing you soon at Cesab.

Verena Trenkel and François Massol

A WORD FROM BRUNO FADY, PRESIDENT OF CESAB’S SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

It is worth recalling that CESAB is an infrastructure of the FRB, a unique and original tool in the French research landscape. It is one of the rare scientific tools that have been created in the world over the last 30 years, based on the observation that the data generated, and collected during short-term projects, that classically finance research in ecology and biodiversity, are not very well used (Baron et al., 2017). We can only welcome this decision, given the scientific production of the working groups funded with the CESAB, the career path of the young scientists who have been part of and are often the core of these working groups, and the recognition of the work published by many private and institutional actors to improve biodiversity protection (see “CESAB in a Zoom in 2021”). 

The Covid-19 pandemic pointed out that scientific advances are not the work of an isolated individual, of an (unrecognized) genius who emerges in the midst of a crisis, but rather the work of collectives, manipulating and analyzing data that must be compiled and verified, re-testing and re-verifying hypotheses and concepts. A scientific fact only really becomes so when it finally emerges as an evidence, a consensus (in the statistical sense of the term) for the whole scientific community. At a time when the scientific approach and its results are being questioned by part of society, and beyond a relevant (re)development of data, concepts and their analysis for its scientific discipline, the role of CESAB is to disseminate scientific facts to better understand and protect biodiversity. 

After two mandates as president of the CESAB scientific committee, it is time for me to hand over. I would have gladly extended my mandate for a longer period of time as the dynamism of CESAB is so strong, reminding me a little of the enthusiastic state of mind that reigned when it was created more than 10 years ago. But, fortunately, our statutes do not allow it and a new scientific committee will be created in 2022. 

The CESAB is now a French institution, widely recognized. Scientists working in the field of ecology and biodiversity are not mistaken, they apply each year in greater numbers to the FRB-CESAB calls for proposals. I hope that the founding members of the FRB, the French public authorities and biodiversity stakeholders will continue to actively support the CESAB, financing at least several working groups per year and the structure itself. With France’s reaffirmed commitments to biodiversity protection at the World Conservation Congress in Marseille in September 2021, I have no doubt that this will be the case. 

Happy New Year to all, welcome to the new scientific committee and long live the CESAB.  

Bruno Fady

A WORD FROM THE SCIENTIFIC DIRECTOR

We are living crazy times! The world is struggling with a major pandemic for more than a year, with dramatic consequences in terms of human lives lost and economic costs. But paradoxically, this crisis reduced (temporally) our impact on the planet, and thus might have also some positive consequences on biodiversity. Now that our economies are starting over, the question is now much we will have learned from the Covid crisis and its side-effects on the environmental crisis, so we do not go back to the business-as-usual GIEC scenario and end up losing on both sides.  

The scientific community took the opportunity of the Covid crisis to experiment how science could be made through virtual interactions. Synthesis centers have been at the forefront of this “experimentation” as our core activity is to gather scientists from all over the world. We had to rapidly adapt to supporting fully virtual working groups and after a year we can conclude that virtual meetings, while providing a bridge during the pandemic, cannot replace intense, in-person immersion meetings (Srivastava et al., 2021). Science and particularly synthesis science is also about social interactions between people : these direct interactions fuel collective and creative thinking needed for groups to work on what is planned, and more importantly imagine the unplanned. But, as scientists and more importantly environmental scientists, we must be at the forefront of the paradigm shifts our societies need to go through, to mitigate the environmental crisis. We are thus thinking of re-organizing biodiversity synthesis centers in regional hubs where research teams within each geographic region could meet simultaneously as in-person working groups. These “regional hubs” would also coordinate virtually with each other among synthesis centers. This will not preclude the need to gather whole groups within the lifetime of a project but might significantly reduce the amount of travels and thus the carbon impact of the synthesis working groups. This reorganization of our scientific models will take some time but the price is worth to pay!  

© Graeme Mackay  

The Covid crisis cannot make us forget about the ongoing environmental crisis, it should rather exemplify how humanity can work together to solve a global crisis; it should also exemplify how much costly it is to solve a crisis when the crisis is at its climax. The environmental and biodiversity crisis, are not at their climax, they are only beginning. Let’s hope that we will pay the price needed to stop these crisis before we cannot afford to pay it anymore …   

These last six months have been particularly busy for the CESAB team and groups. This newsletter reflect this rich activity and the best is yet to come with many new groups starting this year and next. I would like here to thanks thoroughly the CESAB and FRB staff as well as the CESAB scientific committee for the incredible work they already have achieved this year; and thanks the whole FRB and its founders to make all this possible. With the 4 projects funded in the 2020 call and the upcoming 2 projects funded via our France-Brazil joint call, the CESAB will host 20 active groups by 2022. This strong and positive dynamics reflect our collective willingness to fulfill the need for synthesis in biodiversity science as well as the incredible quality and maturity of the scientific community on this fundamental issue. Synthesis will help us tackle the biodiversity crisis before it reaches its climax and I am proud that, at its small scale, the CESAB is helping toward this aim.  

Nicolas Mouquet 

A WORD FROM THE NEW FRB’S PRESIDENT: DENIS COUVET

Denis Couvet

Despite the health situation, which does not allow researchers to meet at the CESAB in Montpellier, the groups remain active and work remotely. This is the case this week for the participants of the projects FREE and RED-BIO. 

FREE – about functional rarity 

FREE began in 2018 and works on functional rarity: how to define this rarity, how to quantify it and how to identify its causes and consequences. FREE ‘s participants have recently published, in collaboration with researchers from different institutes, an article based on data collected within the project and in which they show that ecologically rare species of birds and terrestrial mammals are also the most threatened (see the press release “Double jeopardy for ecologically rare birds and terrestrial mammals“).

Led by Cyrille Violle (CNRS) and Caroline Tucker (University of Colorado, USA), the group met (online!) this week to catch up on the various work in progress within the project.

RED-BIO –  about spatial ecology and ecological networks 

RED-BIO started this year and the participants have not yet had the opportunity to hold their first meeting at the CESAB in Montpellier. However, they were able to organize their first virtual meeting with the support of the FRB’s CESAB team and the Canadian Institute for Ecology and Evolution (CIEE). This is an opportunity for the participants to discuss the project’s progress and its main research question: under which conditions, the interactions between biological communities and the environment could generate spatial heterogeneity in abiotic resources?

The participants cover a wide geographical range from Vancouver, Canada, to Montpellier, France, and this first meeting allowed to clearly see the diversity of ideas within the group, but above all to detect elements of convergence. This project was selected from the joint call SYNERGY in collaboration with the CIEE and is led by Isabelle Gounand (CNRS) and Eric Harvey (Université de Montréal).

First meeting of the Red-Bio group

These meetings allow the FRB-CESAB’s groups to continue working on their projects and several scientific articles have been published in the last few months, some of them in high impact journals as Nature Communication, Global Change Biology,… see all the articles here. CESAB’s main objective is to advance knowledge in order to improve our understanding of ecosystems and their biodiversity and thus ensure their effective management and conservation.

The FRB’s Center for the Synthesis and Analysis of Biodiversiry (CESAB) and the GDR EcoStat organised the second edition of the training course Data Toolbox for Reproducible Research in Computational Ecology online. The training took place from the 2nd to the 6th of November 2020. 

23 students, engineers and researchers from all over France were able to attend this training course online. 

Nicolas CASAJUS (FRB-Cesab), Stéphane DRAY (CNRS LBBE), Olivier GIMENEZ (CNRS Cefe), François GUILHAUMON (IRD Marbec), Nina SCHIETTEKATTE (EPHE Criobe) presented the essential tools for reproducible research (git/GitHub, rmarkdown, drake, R packages, etc.). Participants were also able to put into practice the knowledge acquired at the beginning of the training through projects in sub-groups on the Thursday and the Friday. 

Subscribe to the newsletter of the FRB and its CESAB to be kept informed about the next edition of the training course.

Within the framework of the research infrastructure “National hub for biodiversity data” (in French PNDB: Pôle national des données de biodiversité), the research and actions in progress on making data FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable – propose the implementation of products and services, around the biodiversity data, “as FAIR and open as possible”.

Thanks to the support of the DevLOG network (network of actors in the field of software development within Higher Education and Research), the PNDB is organizing workshops open to all, including an introductory training aspect.

This workshop takes place from October 19 to 21 from multiple remote sites (Concarneau, Paris and CESAB in Montpellier).

More information

A WORD FROM THE CESAB SCIENTIFIC DIRECTOR

Nicolas Mouquet

We have all been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Even if it is too early to decipher the conditions that triggered the emergence of the coronavirus, it is, as other major epidemics, related to the environmental and biodiversity crisis we are experiencing.

Prevention could have been possible but they waited for the crisis to appear before acting. Prevention should be at the basis of our collective behavior, prevention and not fear! Prevention requires that we take the time to understand the world and synthesize complex information into meaningful and useful collective knowledge. What is true for the pandemics is true for the ongoing biodiversity crisis. The need for synthesis has never been so strong, synthesis is the only way of fueling appropriate actions. Furthermore, the timescale needed to achieve adequate and reliable synthesis is far longer than the rapid appearance of human-caused crisis. Synthesis must happen before!

Edward O. Wilson once said that the world would be run by “synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely”. For once, he was wrong, the world is not run by synthesizers, it is run by people that base their actions on incomplete information, are behind the limes, do not think critically and do not make wise choices ! This is why, today, we need synthesizers more than ever, and yet I do not see very much of collective effort to support synthesis in the agenda of research funding agencies. At our very small scale, synthesis centres, such as CESAB, are trying to promote the art of synthesis in biodiversity science but the level of funding we are receiving is inversely proportional to the importance of our mission.

After every crisis, we hear voices saying that the “world will never be the same again”. This is not true, a simple synthesis of crises during the 20th century show the exact opposite pattern. However, this does not mean that we have to give up, but rather that we need to understand and remember: we must synthesize !

Nicolas Mouquet

2020 will be the year of biodiversity! The biodiversity crisis has become central in the international agenda after the publication by the IPBES of the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in 2019. 2020 will see major events with the IUCN world conservation congress to be held in Marseille in June and the COP15 Biodiversity in Kunming, among many others.

Biodiversity synthesis centres have fueled this dynamic by promoting the scientiflc synthesis on biodiversity and helping researchers to adapt to the exponential increase in available data and to the globalization of scientiflc ecology. We can be proud of what have been achieved but are also concerned about what still need to be done and how we will contribute to assess the knowledge gaps on biodiversity.

2019 have been a year of transition for the CESAB, we have moved to Montpellier and have created a new ecosystem, integrating many new partners, and experiencing new tools to promote biodiversity synthesis. We have launched joint calls with other synthesis centers (German sDiv, Canadian CIEE) and French scientiflc actors (AFB, Labex Cemeb), have organized a training course for young scientists on reproductibility in ecological data science and held an international conference on large scale conservation in Montpellier. This has been possible thanks to the help of the incredible FRB team dedicated to CESAB and more generally of the FRB, and to the dynamism of our many ongoing working groups.

2020 will be the year we consolidate this ecosystem, open new ambitious calls for synthesis groups and amplify the momentum. We now have the trust and support from our founding members and partners and are trying to work together to make CESAB contribute even more to the biodiversity synthesis!

Best wishes for this new year.

Nicolas Mouquet

From 2 to 6 December, the FRB’s Center for the Synthesis and Analysis of Biodiversiry (CESAB) and the GDR EcoStat organised a training course entitled Data Toolbox for Reproducible Research in Computational Ecology.

17 students, engineers and researchers from all over France came to attend this training at CESAB’s premises in Montpellier.

Nicolas CASAJUS (FRB-Cesab), Stéphane DRAY (CNRS LBBE), Olivier GIMENEZ (CNRS Cefe), Loreleï GUÉRY (IRD Marbec), François GUILHAUMON (IRD Marbec), Nina SCHIETTEKATTE (EPHE Criobe) presented the essential tools for reproducible research (git/GitHub, rmarkdown, drake, R packages, etc.). Participants put into practice the knowledge acquired at the beginning of the training through projects in sub-groups. Everyone left satisfied with this experience.

Building on this success, a second edition will be organised in 2020. Subscribe to the newsletter of the FRB and its CESAB to be kept informed.

• Joint call FRB-CESAB / CIEE : launch December 3, 2019

Biodiversity in a time of global change

The Canadian Institute of Ecology and Evolution (CIEE) and the Centre for the Synthesis and Analysis of Biodiversity (CESAB) of the French Foundation for Biodiversity Research (FRB) offer a joint call for working groups that include researchers based primarily in Canada and France, on the topic “Biodiversity in a time of Global Change”.

Two working groups of eight researchers will be funded for two meetings each (the first one in 2020 in Vancouver – Canada; the second one in 2021 in Montpellier – France).

The full proposals should be sent by e-mail before 31/01/2020 and the selection will be made by the 06/03/2020.

• Joint call FRB-CESAB / CeMEB: launch December 9, 2019

Short term stays for foreign researchers (2-3 months)

The CeMEB LabEx (Mediterranean Environment and Biodiversity Centre) and the Centre for the Synthesis and Analysis of Biodiversity (CESAB) of the French Foundation for Biodiversity Research (FRB) offer financial support for hosting 2 foreign researchers for short stays at the CESAB in Montpellier (from 2 months minimum to 3 months maximum).

The full proposals should be sent by e-mail before 12/03/2020 and the selection will be made by the 15/05/2020.

A WORD FROM THE SCIENTIFIC DIRECTOR

Nicolas Mouquet