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Month: July 2019

[FRB-CESAB] Newsletter 1 CESAB – July 2019

A WORD FROM THE SCIENTIFIC DIRECTOR

 

FRB Cesab Nicolas Mouquet

Nicolas Mouquet


The CESAB has moved to Montpellier after 8 years of in Aix-en-Provence. 2018 has been a year of transition and we are still adjusting to our new environment in 2019! Moving has been an incredible challenge and I want to thank here the former CESAB director and staff as well as the FRB for having worked hard to make it happen.By bringing together the best international scientific teams around scientific synthesis, combining data, models and concepts, the work of CESAB should enable us to better understand the functioning of biodiversity, its state and its dynamics, from local to global scales. By shedding some light on the organization of ecological systems and socio-ecosystems, CESAB should help us address the complexity of these systems and the conditions of their resilience.
 
Moving to Montpellier is for the CESAB a great opportunity to evolve and match the new challenges of biodiversity science. There is a real need for us to secure more funding for open calls but also to open our calls and the CESAB to other actors concerned with biodiversity research and conservation. IPBES 7th Plenary in Paris has been an incredible catalyzer for biodiversity science, and I hope we will meet together the challenge we face to provide both an understanding of biodiversity dynamics and large-scale predictions of its fate in a changing world.
 

For us, these last months have been the occasion for rethinking our functioning and to test some new tools and initiatives, we have hired new staff, launched two specific calls: one with the AFB (French Agency for Biodiversity) and one joint call with the sDiv (German Biodiversity Synthesis Center), renewed our scientific comity, are working to propose formation for students, and have done our best to help the ongoing and new CESAB groups. This has been done in only few months, which illustrates our collective motivation to continue the CESAB and to help more than ever the scientific community working on biodiversity. I want here to thanks the new FRB staff dedicated to CESAB without whom I would never have survived to this first half of 2019 and all FRB team for their trust and help! I also want to make homage to Eric Garnier and Alison Specht, former scientific directors of the CESAB, who have worked to make the CESAB a leading research organization with a high scientific level and international influence.

 

Biodiversity centers are the right tools to meet the challenges we face with the biodiversity crisis. I really hope 2019 will be the year when public and private actors concerned with the state of biodiversity, will realize how much we have a collective responsibility to give these centers the means they need to support the science of biodiversity synthesis! 

 

Nicolas Mouquet

 
 

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