Chaire Modélisation Mathématique et Biodiversité

École Polytechnique, Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle
Fondation de l'École Polytechnique
VEOLIA Environnement

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Rencontre de la chaire

8 avril 2026 matin

Amphi Rouelle (bâtiment de la baleine - plan d'accès)

(Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris).

Programme:


9h45 - 10h00 : Accueil café

10h00 - 10h40 : Pablo Marquet (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) - "The emergence, maintenance, and dynamics of biodiversity".

In this talk, two first principles associated to biodiversity dynamics are examined. The first is niche construction, which is predicated on the facts that organism and environments are interlinked and affect their state and evolution. The second is neutrality, which provides a stochastic persistence criteria for biodiversity maintenance and insights on biodiversity dynamics.

10h45 - 11h25 : Lola De Cubber (Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale) -"Mechanistic Modeling of Marine Ecosystems Using the Dynamic Energy Budget Framework".

Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) models describe how an organism acquires, stores, and uses energy from food to grow, maintain itself, develop, and reproduce throughout its life cycle under varying environmental conditions. Based on their standard structure, they allow the identification of bioenergetic strategies that can be seen as regularities across certain types of organisms, enabling generalization at higher levels of organization. This presentation illustrates how to use these models to address ecological questions spanning physiology, population dynamics, ecosystem structure and functioning, and ecosystem services. It also highlights the upcoming challenges for the wider application of these models in the context of climate change, particularly the difficulty of robust model calibration, accounting for multiple interacting stressors, scaling predictions across levels of biological organization, and integrating adaptive responses such as phenotypic plasticity and evolution.

11h25 - 11h55 : pause

11h55 - 12h35 : Florence Débarre (iEES) - "Environmental granularity and the spatial spread of an allele under frequency-dependent selection"

When does an allele under positive frequency-dependent selection spread? The answer depends on the threshold frequency over which the selection coefficient becomes positive, on the inoculum, but also on the granularity of the environment: An allele spreading in a spatially continuous environment may be stopped when the environment becomes coarser. (While formulated here in terms of allele frequencies, the phenomenon also occurs for population growth with an Allee effect.) An attempt was made to find the critical step size of the environment above which a wave of advance stops. Previous attempts found in the literature involved approximations (stated or not), and were therefore not exact; attempts to refine these results are presented here. Properly estimating the critical step size is particularly important for applications aiming to use coarse environment structures to limit the spatial spread of an allele, notably in the context of gene drive.