Short-term responses of ground-dwelling arthropod communities to habitat loss and fragmentation in experimental mesoscale landscapes.

Habitat loss and fragmentation are main drivers of biodiversity decline. However, disentangling their respective effects remains tricky and contrasting results have emerged in previous studies leading to a call for finely designed landscape-scale experiments that compare different levels of habitat fragmentation at fixed habitat loss, and that for different levels of habitat loss. Here we present early-stage results from MESOLAND, a new landscape-scale experiment designed to monitor the response of ground-dwelling arthropod communities to habitat loss and fragmentation, focusing on their short-term responses.

Ground-Dwelling Spider Community Responses to Forest Management in a Mediterranean Oak Forest.

Timber production is one of the most important ecosystem services provided by hardwood forests, but clear-cutting causes severe soil disturbance. There is a current need to develop alternative forest management practices to clear-cutting in order to simultaneously promote timber production, preserve biodiversity and enhance forest health and economic value. Here, we experimentally manipulated a forest to evaluate the effects of a thinning gradient (i.

ORCHAMP: an observation network for monitoring biodiversity and ecosystem functioning across space and time in mountainous regions.

Recent climate and land use change, and pollution have led to concerning alterations in biodiversity and ecosystem functions, jeopardizing nature’s contributions to people. Mountainous regions are not immune to these threats, experiencing the impacts of global warming, increased recreational activities, and changes in agricultural practices. Leveraging the natural elevational gradients of mountain environments, the ORCHAMP program was established in 2016 as a comprehensive initiative to monitor, understand, and predict the repercussions of environmental changes on biodiversity and associated ecosystem functions in the French Alps and Pyrenees.

Microrefugia and microclimate: Unraveling decoupling potential and resistance to heatwaves.

Microrefugia, defined as small areas maintaining populations of species outside their range margins during environmental extremes, are increasingly recognized for their role in conserving species in the face of climate change. Understanding their microclimatic dynamics becomes crucial with global warming leading to severe temperature and precipitation changes. This study investigates the phenomenon of short-term climatic decoupling within microrefugia and its implications for plant persistence in the Mediterranean region of southeastern France.

Tritiated stainless steel (nano)particle release following a nuclear dismantling incident scenario: Significant exposure of freshwater ecosystem benthic zone.

Nuclear facilities continue to be developed to help meet global energy demands while reducing fossil fuel use. However, an incident during the dismantling of these facilities could accidentally release tritiated particles (e.g.

Transfer, transformation, and impacts of ceria nanomaterials in aquatic mesocosms simulating a pond ecosystem.

Mesocosms are an invaluable tool for addressing the complex issue of exposure during nanoecotoxicological testing. This experimental strategy was used to take into account parameters as the interactions between the NPs and naturally occurring (in)organic colloids (heteroaggregation), or the flux between compartments of the ecosystems (aqueous phase, sediments, biota) when assessing the impacts of CeO2 NPs in aquatic ecosystems. In this study, we determine the transfer, redox transformation, and impacts of 1 mg L(-1) of bare and citrate coated CeO2-NPs toward an ecologically relevant organism (snail, Planorbarius corneus) exposed 4 weeks in a complex experimental system mimicking a pond ecosystem.

An adaptable mesocosm platform for performing integrated assessments of nanomaterial risk in complex environmental systems.

Physical-chemists, (micro)biologists, and ecologists need to conduct meaningful experiments to study the environmental risk of engineered nanomaterials with access to relevant mechanistic data across several spatial and temporal scales. Indoor aquatic mesocosms (60L) that can be tailored to virtually mimic any ecosystem appear as a particularly well-suited device. Here, this concept is illustrated by a pilot study aimed at assessing the distribution of a CeO₂-based nanomaterial within our system at low concentration (1.

Eradications as scientific experiments: progress in simultaneous eradications of two major invasive taxa from a Mediterranean island.

Background: Black rats, Rattus rattus, and mat-forming iceplants, Carpobrotus aff. acinaciformis and Carpobrotus edulis, are pervasive pests on Mediterranean islands. Their cumulative impacts on native biotas alter the functioning of island ecosystems and threaten biodiversity.

Exposure to cerium dioxide nanoparticles differently affect swimming performance and survival in two daphnid species.

The CeO₂ NPs are increasingly used in industry but the environmental release of these NPs and their subsequent behavior and biological effects are currently unclear. This study evaluates for the first time the effects of CeO₂ NPs on the survival and the swimming performance of two cladoceran species, Daphnia similis and Daphnia pulex after 1, 10 and 100 mg.L⁻¹ CeO₂ exposures for 48 h.