Joint Call CESAB- sDiv SYNERGY: Coexistence and stability in high-diversity communities

CESAB and sDiv are instruments of the French FRB (Foundation for Research on Biodiversity) and German iDiv (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research). These two centers offer to host groups of researchers to work on a better use of existing data, information and knowledge to foster theoretical, and synthetic thinking in biodiversity research. They are now proposing a joint call called “synergy” to fund two theory driven groups of 5-7 researchers that will share their meetings between the two centers.

The main topic of the call will be “Coexistence and stability in high-diversity communities”. Modern coexistence theory provides a useful framework for understanding the coexistence of dominant species, but is limited to few interacting species, and is not predictive or extendable to novel or real setting contexts. This joint call aims at fostering a synthesis to understand coexistence and stability in typical high-diversity communities that are often composed of relatively few dominant species and many low-abundance species. Such a focus could include new theories, methods of data collection and analysis. Modeling approaches, both mechanistic and statistical, could be novel or extend existing frameworks. Understanding the consequences of global change as a driver of diversity change would be a desirable applied outcome.

Two groups of 5-7 researchers will be funded for four meetings each. They will have two joint meetings (one at the beginning and one at the end) to foster synergies and complementarities between groups and work plans. The first joint meeting will be organized at CESAB and the final joint meeting at sDiv. The two other individual meetings will be organized either at CESAB or sDiv (depending on the composition of the groups). One of two PIs must be associated with a French research institute or with iDiv (the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research).

Pre-Proposal: You will be able to submit a full proposal only if you are invited to after a successfully reviewed pre-proposal. Whether you can submit a full proposal will be decided by the sDiv and CESAB scientific boards within two weeks following the pre-proposal deadline. The pre-proposal includes: (a) Information about the PI. (b) A brief description of the aims, scope and scientific objectives of the planned project, its approach, and its synthesis aspect. (c) A list of researchers who have agreed to participate.

Pre-proposals must be submitted exclusively by email to cesab@fondationbiodiversite.fr.

They must include:

• The pre-proposal form to be downloaded bellow, and converted to pdf format 
• Two pages of information about the project principal investigator (CV, publications, etc.)

Download:

• Call for Proposal – CESAB-sDiv SYNERGY– Coexistence and stability in high-diversity communities 
• Pre-proposal form – CESAB-sDiv SYNERGY – Coexistence and stability in high-diversity communities

Selected projects:

Two projects were selected by the steering and selection committee: 

• INTRACO

Unravelling the role of intraspecific variability in tree specied coexsistence in tropical forest

PIs: Ghislain VIEILLEDENT – CIRAD AMAP Montpellier (France), Isabelle MARECHAUX – INRAE AMAP Montpellier (France)

• UNICOP

Unification of modern Coexistence theory and Price equation

PIs: Bradley A. DUTHIE – University of Stirling (United Kingdom), Sébastien LION – CEFE CNRS Montpellier (France)