About my research
My research is motivated by a strong pleasure to explore and understand our world, which is based on a fascination for nature [1]. I focus on understanding the mechanisms structuring and (de-)stabilising natural communities, as well as the anthropogenic perturbations affecting these species assemblages, but I am interested in a wide range of topics in Ecology and Evolution. I mainly use plant-pollinator interactions as a study model, coupled with mechanistic and theoretical approaches to investigate how the distribution of direct and indirect interspecific interactions affects species coexistence. In parallel, I use macro-ecological and empirical approaches to estimate the impact of global changes on the distribution, co-occurrence and evolutionary trajectories of species. This empirical aspect of my research focuses on the statistical analysis of past temporal dynamics to understand the consequences of global change for biodiversity, from species to communities.
[1] « Le savant n’étudie pas la nature parce que cela est utile ; il l’étudie parce qu’il y prend plaisir et il y prend plaisir parce qu’elle est belle. » Henri Poincaré, Science et méthode (1908)
Research is a collective work
None of my works have been conducted alone. This point is important and should be highlighted. None of my projects could have been achieved without these collaborators, who have taken time to exchange during hours and participate to these studies, and without these numerous researchers who took time to share ideas, built collaborative tools, etc. Thus, my research activities owe a lot to the collegiality and are not really my research only but the results of a collaborative work.
The ability to have deep interactions with other researchers is possible only in a configuration in which researchers have time to do research, to explore spontaneous ideas when they come. I am one of those who think that the current international way of doing research, pushing researchers to become managers and spending time to look for fundings instead of doing research by themselves, is deleterious for science. I think it is deleterious because of two main reasons: (i) it exacerbates competition at lower levels of the pyramid, promote false collaboration relatively to deep and cross-generational interactions, (ii) it increases the permeability of academic research to private fundings and thus to private interests. Research is a common good of human societies, and I think researchers have the responsibility to fight against any attempt to that, to preserve a public research that aims to produce knowledge for human societies. Maintaining this common good requires to fight against processes that promote individual and private interests over public ones: economic system imposed by the scientific journals, leading to a waste of public money, evaluation system, that lead to run after productivity, etc. Some inspiring readings have shown that our evaluation system, based on citations and publication productivity, is unfair (Davies et al., 2021) and can easily lead to a selection of “bad science” (Smaldino & McElreath, 20016).
French research is now under great pressures to accelerate the transition to a more “international and competitive” system: https://aoc.media/opinion/2021/04/26/chercher-pour-le-bien-commun/. This shift to a vertical organization of research teams will undoubtedly increase even more the pressure to produce more, regardless the quality, and favours the permeability of research to conflict of interests, while future challenges for human societies require to preserve integrity of science. More informations and more opinions can be found here: https://rogueesr.fr/