Month: September 2022

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