In order to remediate the negative externalities caused by urbanization, urban planning policies are turning to developing productive and sustainable cities based on the development of nature in the city. The Bises project “Biodiversity of Urban soils in sustainable cities: state of art, interactions between productive/unproductive green spaces and ecosystem services provisions” aims to support this transition through an increase of soil ecology scientific knowledge in urban socio-ecosystems. These breakthroughs are necessary to set multifunctional green spaces. The project is based on a consortium constituted by academic labs ((UMR CEFE, UMR AgroEcologie Dijon, UMR LSE, UMR CESCO, UMR EPhor, UMR IEES-Paris, OSU ECCE Terra) and and a non governmental organization GO (Plante & Cité). It will be deployed in four french metropoles with different biopedoclimatic conditions (Paris, Nancy, Nantes and Montpellier). The main objective is to gain a better understanding of soil organisms in cities and particularly of the spatial and temporal dynamics in various urban land uses: private gardens, parks or urban farms. A challenge will be to evaluate the impact of practices but also colonization process on urban soil biodiversity functions and associated services (support, food production, biomass production, air/water regulation or biocontrol). The scientific originality of the project is based on: • The combination of all the soil fauna taxa (macro, meso and micro-fauna) and microorganisms (bacteria and fungi), which has never been done before at a national scale. • The development and application of approaches based on the linkage of all soil taxa through the calculation of aggregated indicators or multi-phylum interaction webs. • The linkage of academic science and citizen science based on a co-construction at all steps of the scientific process and will help to access to private land uses, which represent an important part of urban green spaces. • A spatially explicit approach on soil biodiversity, which is still limited • The link between soil biodiversity properties, functions and ecosystem services. The scientific program is divided between a coordination Work-package (WP 0) and four-knowledge production WP’s. WP1 is dedicated to sampling design and sampled site selection. WP2 is dedicated to the use of the biodiversity indicators dashboard (biodiversity, functional biodiversity and functions). WP3 will develop aggregated indicators based on WP1 and WP2 outputs and will address the link between biodiversity and Ecosystem services. WP4 is dedicated to dissemination and various citizen science actions. Besides major advances in terms of basic research in soil ecology, macro ecology or functional ecology in urban landscapes, the project will lead to the validation of a dashboard of the biological quality of urban soils for the sustainable management of cities.

Global changes are causing deep modifications of ecosystems and their functioning, leading directly to species extinctions and functional shifts and indirectly to alterations of the ecosystem services they deliver. In the last decades, modelling the impact of global changes on biodiversity and ecosystem services has been an active area of research with strong expectations from conservation agencies, national and international programs, as well as biodiversity managers and conservation associations. However, most existing models still ignore basic mechanisms including biotic and abiotic interactions. Biodiversity is not merely the sum of species, but is also the result of interacting species that form assemblages, at various spatial and temporal resolutions, with different functional characteristics and evolutionary histories. Models ignoring these mechanisms are prone to provide erroneous predictions of how global changes will impact biodiversity or ecosystem services. Addressing these gaps requires a multi-scale approach that spans different fields of ecology and statistics with input from stakeholders and policy makers in order to ensure that the results from the theoretical research can realistically be implemented. Recently, tremendous progress has been made in extending species distribution models to Joint Species Distribution Models (JSDMs). These models predict species distributions based on environmental and spatial variables, but they also allow species to share information on their responses. JSDMs hierarchically model biodiversity from the species level to the functional group level, taking into account potential dependencies between species - for example based on their phylogenetic distances. JSDMSs expand and unify classical methods used in community ecology or in conservation biology and are currently used to model synergies and tradeoffs between ecosystem services. However, as promising as they are, the large and extensive use of JSDMs is still hampered by several limitations both ecologically and statistically that GAMBAS proposes to address. First, there is a lack of a clear classification and nomenclature associated with the ecological and statistical assumptions on which they are based. Second, JSDMs provide estimates of correlation between species. But do these correlations indicate true interactions between species? Third, mathematical developments are required to elucidate links between statistical and ecological assumptions or to insure a more robust and efficient use. Finally, JSDMs, which currently remain an academic research topic, have rarely been confronted to practical problems such as the identification of conservation zones. In GAMBAS, we will focus on the analysis of five datasets, which will both be an inspiration and will constitute the first concrete case studies for our developments. GAMBAS gathers a collective comprised of quantitative ecologists and mathematicians with aspirations in ecology. These investigators will be supported by an advisory committee composed of representatives of the French government and civil societies. Together, they have set the goal of expanding JSDMs and to promote their use in community ecology, biogeography, and conservation ecology.

In response to a request made by students in agricultural education (AE), a consortium involving AE, MNHN and CEFE was created in 2021, in order to study the complex and poorly-known relationship between livestock breeding and coprophagous beetles communities. Over the course of two years of collaboration, systems that not only answer the initial question, but also enrich educational approaches, improve scientific knowledge and question practices have been devised, discussed and tested with students and teachers in a dozen establishments. They are now intended to be deployed in agricultural schools throughout metropolitan France. Designed to answer the questions of AE learners, these systems allow future farmers to become familiar with the scientific approach and to participate in the constitution of a new knowledge, a key issue for agroecology development. Initiated early in their career, the approach should accompany future farmers in their practices and thus concern a large part of the society, while enriching research questions.

Anthropogenic environmental changes increasingly threaten biodiversity and ecosystem services, thus kindling a societal demand for predictions that ecology as a science has yet to answer. Available models are poorly suited to predicting the ecological effects of such changes because they ignore variation in species’ niche due to ecological interactions and evolution. Without understanding the functioning of ecological networks and how they are shaped by evolution, it is indeed difficult to predict how changes of the environment will cascade through ecosystems and make species traits evolve. Understanding the dynamics of ecological networks is a dual goal, both for fundamental research and for building informed programs on sustainable ecosystem services and species conservation. Accounting for species interactions and evolution to understand the consequences of global changes is the critical question we want to tackle through an integrative approach that combines coevolutionary models and analyses of empirical datasets, existing or to be obtained through the project actions. We will tackle these challenges by capitalizing on the strengths of a pluridisciplinary consortium with highly complementary skills, from theoretical modelling to expert field work and taxonomical identification. First, we will build evolutionary models of spatially structured antagonistic and mutualistic networks to understand how evolution affects (i) the association of traits in interacting species, (ii) the dynamical properties of ecological networks, and (iii) the dynamics of species’ ranges when embedded in a network of interactions. These models will help understand how climate change, eutrophication and pollution affect the properties of interaction networks through the evolution of interaction strengths and species dispersal abilities. These models will hint at how and why some specialization traits can be evolutionarily associated with higher dispersal, and thus will suggest trait associations within and across networks that can then be tested. Effects of natural selection on the stability of feasible ecological equilibria will also be studied in the context of May’s diversity-stability paradox. Finally, studying the dynamics of species’ ranges in networks will allow us to make predictions of how trait evolution shapes the geographical distribution of mutualistic or trophic partners. Second, we will test these models (i) on existing databases on traits and interactions and (ii) using new observations. Existing databases on food web and plant-pollinator networks, on species traits and on geographical distributions will be tapped to uncover correlations between species traits and their position within networks, and among traits in species with different trophic niches or different degrees of specialization. We will also perform field surveys to test predictions of our models. The first survey will assess plant-pollinator interactions and their associated traits along a thousand-kilometre long latitudinal gradient of calcareous grasslands. Focusing on a few entomophilous, widely distributed plant species, we will identify and measure relevant traits of their associated pollinating fauna. Plant traits will be measured along the gradient to uncover associations between trait values and breadths of the pollinator spectrum. The second survey will compare herbivore and pollinator communities associated with metallicolous vs. non-metallicolous genotypes of the plant species Noccaea caerulescens. We will assess the links between the abundances of pollinators and herbivores, differences in heavy metal accumulation abilities and variation in self-fertilization rates in plants.

Western societies seem to have built themselves "against nature", as Serge Moscovici (1972) put it. According to a growing number of specialists (Parma Declaration, WHO 2010), more and more of us are suffering from "nature deficit disorder", with deleterious consequences for our health. Its corollary is the "extinction of the experience of nature" and its effects on our lack of commitment to biodiversity. Against this backdrop, which requires both support for the socio-ecological transition and careful attention to individual well-being, offering children varied experiences of nature from an early age is a key issue. Although public policies have recently become aware of this urgency, and have introduced it in several major texts in the early childhood field (e.g., in the Charter of the first 1000 days in September 2020, in the National Charter for the care of young children in 2021, in the strategy for combating and preventing poverty established in 2021), professional practices and constraints are still largely unsuited to bringing children (and the adults who accompany them) back in nature. This research-action project aims to fill this gap: it proposes an innovative approach to support early childhood professionals and parents (hereinafter referred to as "referring adults") to experience nature with young children (0-3 years), with the help of a catalog of activities, which are participatory co-constructed and validated by volunteer referring adults. A participatory platform, designed and created through the collaboration of the four project partner teams, will enable the referring adults to find inspiration, interact with each other and co-construct these early-learning practices in contact with nature. Eventually, this platform will become a pedagogical resource center, and provide a vast amount of data that can be mobilized by research to characterize the effects of nature experiences on children and on referring adults, but also on the child-adult relationship, on relations between adults and on the design of the early child caring professions. This co-research project is dedicated to the co-design and the first steps of this platform. The relationship with nature and the relationship with others being at the heart of this project, conservation sciences (at Cesco) and information and communication sciences (at Cerlis) are brought together in this highly interdisciplinary project, which aims to link the study of the semiotics of nature experience and its operational translation: proposing, collecting and sharing these nature experiences in a digital platform enabling to enlarge the participating community, to make exchanges faster, and to archive posted data. This project is initiated and co-supported by Label Vie, a association from Social and Solidarity Economy founded in 2002s and that supports early childhood facilities for ecological, social and health transition. Label Vie has always championed the major role of contact with nature in the well-being and health of young children. Through its network of almost 1,000 early childhood facilities, Label Vie has a very good practical knowledge of the early childhood and how to mobilize the professional community. Finally, the Mosaic service unit, founded in 2020 following a PIA investment; it is a partner in twenty participatory research schemes based on data co-production and sharing platforms; Mosaic will be the methodological and technical partner for this platform project.