Given the large-scale challenges related to climate change and biodiversity collapse, calls are made for societies to implement transformative approaches of their social-ecological systems. However, although this idea of transformation has become more prominent, there is no clear consensus as to what it means in practice, and it raises major methodological challenges. ENACT aims to implement an innovative intervention research to develop, test and monitor practical levers to enhance agri-food system stakeholders’ transformative capacity, focusing on food consumers. It will be conducted in a Long-Term Social-Ecological Research (LTSER) site, the “Zone Atelier Plaine & Val de Sèvre” (Western France). Its main research question is: How to enhance consumers’ individual and collective design capacity in order to increase their capacity to transform their agri-food system? It tackles major potential obstacles such as consumers’ fixation effect and lack of agency. ENACT is organised in 4 work packages: WP1: Map food consumers’ fixation effect and test cognitive levers to increase their capacity of idea generation; WP2: Test the opportunity to increase consumers’ transformative capacity with innovative design workshops; WP3: Co-design and test levers to develop consumer leadership, agency and reflexivity; and WP4: Build a conceptual framework linking consumers’ transformative capacity and agri-food system transformation. ENACT will allow the principal investigator, Elsa Berthet, to strengthen her research leadership and consolidate the interdisciplinary collaborations she has set up with researchers from the CEBC (INRAE, CNRS; ecology), LaPsyDé (La Sorbonne; psychology), CGS (Mines Paristech; management and design science) and SADAPT/IDEAS (INRAE; agronomy and design science), as well as facilitators and local stakeholders.

It is expected that 70% of the world population will be urban by 2050. Therefore, guaranteeing the quality of life of urban populations is a crucial challenge for the upcoming decades. Since their settlement, cities have drastically changed and they are one of the environments where global changes are the fastest and most pronounced. Indeed, urban environments are perceived as an ecological desert, and this lack of wildlife is of particular concern for humans because contact with “nature” is crucial for the health and well-being of humans. Despite these constraints, some animals are able to inhabit in cities and studying these sentinel species can help us to better understand the impacts of urbanization on wild vertebrates, and thus, help us to improve the quality of life of human populations. In this context, URBASTRESS proposes to focus on a human-commensal species, the house sparrow, to investigate the costs and benefits of urbanization. This species is especially relevant because it will allow us to evaluate the impact of ongoing and emerging urban constraints on one of the only wild vertebrate that is supposed to be well adapted to an urban lifestyle. Moreover, this project is timely because several European populations of sparrows have been declining in the past decades. To reach our aim, we will use an original approach that integrates methods and concepts of demography, physiology, ecology, and environmental health. To investigate the proximate causes of urban population trends of the house sparrow, this innovative project will span several scales of investigation from modifications of physiological performances at an individual level up to demographic processes. We will specifically study allostasis-related physiological mechanisms to assess the constraints of living in an urban environment, but also to test whether the physiology of this wild vertebrate species is flexible enough to allow them to adjust to these constraints. This project will specifically focus on the physiological mechanisms (stress response, immune and metabolic responses) that are likely to constrain and/or determine the ability of individuals to adjust to 3 environmental variables of interest (noise, pathogens, food shortage). Such approach is necessary to better assess (1) the relative impact of urban-related environmental factors on performances (costs and benefits); (2) the ability of individuals to adjust their phenotype to maximize the benefits of living in an urban environment while limiting its costs; (3) the potential of urbanization to mediate an ecological trap for urban dwellers. To reach these objectives, we will first establish a large scale demographic survey to evaluate the environmental characteristics of the urban environment and to test their impact on the demography of sparrows. Second, we will evaluate the physiological constraints of the urban habitat and we will examine how urban individuals may physiologically cope with urban challenges (stress, pathogens, energetic constraints). Finally, we will assess the impact of these environmental and physiological constraints on individual fitness. For all these steps, we will use an experimental approach to test our working hypotheses. The success of this project will be guaranteed not only by the expertise of this young and productive team, but also by promising preliminary results. This project will be of interest to a wide public because it targets a key societal question – the biological sustainability of an urban lifestyle – with complementary, relevant perspectives (ecology, physiology, demography) and actors (scientists, students, local government, volunteers, managers, citizens). To conclude, URBASTRESS will improve our knowledge of the urban constraints and will enable us to understand the way our closest urban vertebrate neighbors may cope with them. Therefore, URBASTRESS will allow us to advise policy-makers on how to improve the management of urban biodiversity.

To date, the contribution of pesticides to the decline of farmland bird species is still controversial. Most studies interested in the effect of agrochemicals are limited to the assessment of the lethal dose 50 (LD50) and tested on a restricted number of model species. They often ignore the delayed effects on the physiology, the behaviour and the life history traits of the individuals, and their evolutionary consequences at the population level. Understanding and quantifying such effects is fundamental for our knowledge of the avian population decline. With PestiStress, I aim at investigating the effects of realistic pesticide cocktail through two complementary approaches, an experimental design in controlled conditions and the monitoring of a natural population, on two farmland flagship species, the Grey partridge (Perdix perdix) and the Montagu’s harrier (Circus pygargus). Especially, the emphasis will be put on neonicotinoid insecticides and on glyphosate-based herbicides, both being supposed to be banned by September 2018 and 2021 in France respectively. PestiStress will provide a first assessment of the effects of these pesticides on avian wildlife fauna by an integrative methodology that involves physiology, behaviour and life history traits. I will also for the first time investigate the transgenerational impact of the pesticides under natural exposure. Finally, the data collected during PestiStress will be used to model population dynamics to decipher the importance of long-term effects for conservational purpose in Montagu’s harrier. In the current societal context in regard to the use of pesticides and their effects on biodiversity and human health, PestiStress will provide new insights that will contribute to one of the major societal challenge in Agroecology for this century.

In wild populations, when settlement opportunities at the natal site are limited, some proportion of offspring undergo natal dispersal, that is, movement between the site of birth and the first breeding site. Dispersal is nearly ubiquitous in populations and it is a crucial driver of ecological and evolutionary patterns. Dispersal is assumed to have fitness costs, and short-term costs of dispersal incurred during the active dispersive phase are well documented. However, although information on immigrant (successful between-population dispersers) fitness is essential for our understanding of dispersal because of its major demographic and evolutionary consequences, information on the fitness costs incurred by immigrants is lacking, and the mechanistic processes underlying these costs remain almost entirely unknown. Major uncertainties in processes affecting immigrant fitness include a gap regarding our understanding of the performance of immigrants and residents (individuals remaining in their natal population) based on multiple trait approaches, a gap about the relative fitness of immigrants and residents in relation to sex, a gap regarding our understanding of the performance of immigrants and residents in long-lived species, and a gap in the nature of the behavioural and physiological mechanisms determinant of the fitness differences between immigrants and residents. Thus, to move forward, it is essential to understand the demographic and evolutionary consequences of immigrant fitness in wild populations, as well as the underlying mechanisms. ECOMIGR will carry out a comprehensive study of the demographic, behavioural and physiological mechanisms through which fitness of immigrants and residents differ. The project will exploit unique individual phenotypic and capture-recapture data, the latest miniaturized bio-logging technologies, physiological markers, state of the art analytical methods and modelling techniques, and unique long-term databases on the demography of seabirds. Seabirds breed on islands in colonies or in restricted habitat patches, which make them particularly suitable to study dispersal and facilitate the identification of immigrants in monitored populations. The PI has demonstrated the feasibility of quantifying and comparing the fitness costs between immigrant and resident individuals in long-lived species with a multiple demographic trait approach using detailed individual and longitudinal demographic data collected during several decades. By investigating the demographic, phenotypic, behavioural and physiological causes of fitness related differences between immigrants and residents in several long-lived species, and assessing to what extent immigrants and residents differ in their responses to environmental stochasticity, ECOMIGR will represent a major breakthrough in dispersal ecology and eco-evolutionary biology, as well as in conservation biology and the study of the effects of climate change on endangered seabirds.

The current rate of species extinction in the biosphere would be comparable with those of the last massive extinctions. The reduction in the richness of species and genetic diversity is accompanied by deterioration of a great number of ecosystemic services like pollination by animals (i.e. zoogamy). Several biotic (ex.: pathogens, alien species) and abiotic (ex.: habitat loss and fragmentation, agrochemicals, climate change) factors are probably involved in this disturbance of pollination and on the decline of pollinating species leading to a loss of genetic diversity. Genetic diversity of a species is a key factor to counter infection by native and invasive pathogens and to respond to abiotic factor pressures (ex. pollution) in any habitat. Species with an important distribution range, like the honeybee, Apis mellifera, have acquired a great adaptive potential to diverse environmental conditions. Covering Europe, Middle East and Africa, A. mellifera is subdivided into at least 26 physiologically, behaviourally and morphologically distinct subspecies. These subspecies have been grouped into 5 evolutionary branches according to the genetic structure. As an agronomical species of interest, the natural distribution of A. mellifera subspecies has been disturbed for many decades by beekeeping activities, particularly because of international trade of honeybees (ex.: colonies, queens, drones). These movements, which tend to homogenize the diversity, were particularly amplified this last decade due to livestock rebuilding to counter the effects of colony losses. An interesting assumption is that current honeybee declines observed in European apiaries can be caused by commercial and European trades of honeybees by (i) the introduction (for their apicultural traits) of non- adapted and artificially maintained colonies, and (ii) the spread of allochtone and invasive pathogens carried by allochtones bees. Genetic surveys have demonstrated that some populations of honeybee subspecies are adapted to local climate and flora. Those populations thus constitute particularly interesting populations to study and preserve in a context of sustainable beekeeping. The aim of our proposal is to set up, according to a North/South gradient, genetic conservatories of original naturally distributed honeybee populations. These honeybee conservation areas will have as missions: (i) to characterize the genetic and eco-ethologic diversity of honeybees from the West-Mediterranean lineage, (ii) to preserve the genetic diversity of those populations, (iii) to constitute a reserve of diversity usable by the honeybee industry and by beekeepers, (iv) to study the impact of the domesticated honeybee in the maintenance of local floristic diversity, and (v) to be able to use the honeybee as a bio-collector and as a biological indicator of environmental quality. Our Proposal thus comprises several parts which join to form a unit based on research on genetic and behavioral diversity of local honeybee populations and more applied aiming at answering a societal problem which is the conservation of a key species for the environment and human being. We will perform an impact study (using morphological and molecular tools) to determine if each area is appropriate or not for the conservation of honeybee populations, and we will monitor the spatio-temporal dynamics of key parasites involved in the arms race in each studied area (i.e. Varroa, virus, microsporodia, and bacteria).