This page highlights some of the major topics and projects I have worked in (this is not an exhaustive list though). My research has elements related to spatial ecology, metacommunity theory, diversity distribution, and phylogenetic and functional diversity.
Most recent research projects
I currently have two funded projects that look at biodiversity around agricultural field margins in France, using a standardized long-term monitoring network at the national scale. This monitoring network is called 500 ENI and is funded by the Ministry of Agriculture and the Environment since 2012. You can find more about the network here (in French) and here (in English). The name comes from the fact that there are roughly 500 sites that are surveyed each year to document agricultural practices as well as biodiversity in field margins (plants, coleopterans, birds, earth worms) of the main 4 agricultural crops in France (corn, wheat, vineyards, lettuce). These sites were chosen to monitor the non-target effects (in French, Effets Non-Intentionnels = ENI) of agriculture on the surrounding biodiversity. Therefore, the monitoring focuses on agricultural field margins, which receive the indirect effects of agricultural practices applied in the adjacent fields, on top of being managed themselves.
The two projects that I lead, in close collaboration with Guillaume Fried (ANSES), using this dataset are:
ANR AgriBiodiv - Forces structuring biodiversity in agricultural field margins: understanding metacommunities and plant-insect interactions across an agricultural intensification gradient. Here we recover the coleopteran samples from the 500 ENI network (3 samplings per year in each site) and implement a metabarcoding strategy, combined with taxonomic expertise found locally at the CBGP, to identify a large number of specimens effectively. The metabarcoding has been lead by my collaborators, Julien Haran (CIRAD) and Gael Kergoat (INRAE), and the one doing most of the work is a PhD student, Benoit Penel. We then use these community compositions to try to look at the relationships between large-scale environmental gradients (climate and soil), agricultural practices (tillage, fertilizer and pesticide use, management of the field margins per se, etc), and coleopteran diversity and composition. Many students and postdocs have / are participating in this WP, refer to "People" to look them up (Isis Poinas, Marie Charlotte Bopp, Laura Henckel, among others)! And the last WP in this project is about linking plant diversity (composition, richness, functional diversity) to coleopteran communities. Part of this is also carried out by Benoit Penel, and another part is been developed by a postdoc, Léa Genty, who is working on characterizing the relationships between plants and insects in close collaboration with me, Guillaume Fried and Adam Vanbergen (INRAE).
Ecophyto GTP 500 ENI - Permanent working group to coordinate statistical analysis of data from the 500 ENI network (monitoring of non-target effects of agricultural practices in continental France). This group is funded by the Ecophyto II+ program through the OFB, and gathers a large number of people (40+) coming from different backgrounds, from researchers, to agricultural chambers, to policy makers, with the goal to brainstorm around the 500 ENI data, including agricultural practices but also the 4 taxonomic groups that are monitored, produce results, and generate effective outreach. In this project, we collaborate closely with a team at the MNHN in Paris at CESCO who specialize in science communication and also coordinate the network of local observers.
I also participate in a variety of other projects that deal with large-scale species distributions, often, but not always, of important agricultural pests to assess the potential risks associated to their release in new regions or to climate change scenarios. In one of those projects called BEYOND, a large PEPR funded by the ANR and lead by Cindy Morris (INRAE) one of my postdocs, Pedro Nunes, in collaboration with Nicolas Sauvion (INRAE) and Virginie Ravigné (CIRAD) is using different types of SDMs to evaluate the risks associated with two Psyllids that transmit a disease affecting citrus (citrus greening disease, also known as HLB or Huanglongbing) and that has caused great economic losses worldwide. In a project funded by the FAO and led by Cyril Piou (CIRAD), one of our students, Fanny Herbillon, has been analyzing long-term / large-scale monitoring data for the desert locust to understand the relative roles and evolution of locust outbreaks with respect to climate change and management actions. Finally, on a different project with Cyril Piou and several collaborators in the Argentinian research center CEPAVE (Maria Marta Cigliano, among others), a project funded by the cooperation agency Eco-Sud, we are looking at outbreaks of the South American locust Schistocerca cancellata. I also have several satellite smaller collaborations, many of these are not funded and focus on more theoretical aspects of modelling, such as the use of simulations to test methods and scaling issues in macroecology (e.g. David M Kaplan, IRD), or to assess conservation status of mammals in the world (e.g. Johan Michaux, U. de Liège - Belgium; Guila Ganem, CNRS).
Other (older) projects
Species distribution modeling
Methodological issues related to Species Distribution Models (SDMs)
SDMs are a very useful predictive tool when they are used appropriately. However, there are many methodological issues that remain unexplored or underrated, and sometimes SDMs are just not the appropriate tool for the data and goals at hand. Since my thesis, I have worked using simulated data (i.e. a virtual ecologist approach) to test different aspects of the model fitting and testing strategies applied to SDMs. My main partner in this task has been David M Kaplan (MARBEC), and, more recently, Boris Leroy (MNHN), with whom we published a review setting general guidelines for this type of virtual species studies (see publication list, Meynard et al 2019 in Ecography). We are currently working on scaling issues related to SDMs, and will continue to explore methodological strategies for a better use of SDMs in general.
Modelling global species distribution of multiple agricultural pests
Since 2010, when I integrated the INRA (now renamed INRAE to include the E of environment), I have worked on several projects where we tried to anticipate global threats to agriculture coming from either introduction of pests into new areas, or distribution shifts of such pests under climate change scenarios. Modeled organisms include Spider Mites, the desert locust, psyllids that transmit diseases to agricultural crops, Spodoptera, and several species of stem borers (Sesamiina). Collaborations in these topics include the Spider Mites team at the CBGP (e.g. Alain Migeon and Maria Navajas), the Cirad team working on desert locust (e.g. Marie Pierre Chapuis and Cyril Piou), Nicolas Sauvion, Virginie Ravigné and David Ouvrard for the psyllids, Nathalie Gauthier and Gael Kergoat for other pest species.
Model performance and marine mammals conservation
This was a project I am was participating in between 2012-2014 called MORSE: "Management of Ocean Resources under Shifting Expectations: bringing the historical perspective into marine mammal conservation". In the context of this project we will be using historical and current distribution data (mainly for whales) to look at methodological questions in species distribution modelling. For example, some of the datasets have lots of records, including presence and absence data. This is unusual in ecological studies, so we will look at how degrading the datasets (by decreasing number of records and using presence-only data) can change the resulting species distribution estimates. The marine mammals’ data will be complemented with other large datasets (including tuna fisheries data) to address different aspects of the modelling process and their effects on results. This work complements previous simulation work where we showed that the types of species responses to the relevant environmental gradients can affect model classification success rates in significant ways (see Meynard & Kaplan 2012, 2013), so we will complement these results with simulations of virtual species to better understand the behavior of the different modelling strategies. This project also involves a more general diversity aspect, including functional and phylogenetic diversity of marine mammals globally, which are going to be addressed by using distribution maps along with a functional database and a phylogeny of marine mammals.
Species distributions and local richness patterns: from simulations with artificial species to conservation planning for birds of the Chilean forests
This was my thesis project (2003-2006), which I funded mostly through a Rufford Small Grant for Nature Conservation and several small UCDavis research grants for graduate students. As the title indicates, the project incorporated species distribution modeling of birds of the temperate forests of southern Chile. During this period I carried out extensive vegetation and bird surveys in several protected areas in Chile. However, in order to understand which models would be the most appropriate under different circumstances, I started with a simulation study where I used artificial species to compare different modeling strategies. I have used, later on, this simulation strategy to test different aspects of model performance, and the simulation strategy itself was also the subject of a Guest Editorial in the Journal of Biogeography appeared in January 2013. Once distribution maps for each bird species were built, they were used to identify priority areas for conservation within temperate forests in southern Chile by the use of an optimization algorithm (maximization of conservation goals and minimization of total area required), setting minimal area conservation goals for bird species as well as for forest types through a systematic conservation planning approach. On the other hand, bird community data and vegetation data were used to understand the link between bird diversity, habitat vegetation structure and climate within a metacommunity framework.
Diversity, environmental gradients and community ecology
Taxonomic and Functional diversity in agricultural field margins
Thanks to a collaboration with Guillaume Fried (LSV-Anses), we have been looking at plant and coleopteran diversity in field margins in France. We collaborate in multiple projects that take advantage of a large national (French) monitoring effort in agricultural field margins (the so-called 500-ENI network) with the goal of teasing apart the effects of agricultural management from other environmental and biological effects. This has led us to Isis Poinas's thesis, which we co-direct and is focused on metacommunities in field margins, as well as close collaborations with the team CESCO at the MNHN, and several other partners within the 500-ENI network in other projects that are just starting to take shape.
Incorporating phylogenetic and functional information to understand species assemblages in the Mediterranean Sea.
This was a postdoctoral project funded through the Université de Montpellier 2 (2007-2008) and that I carried out in collaboration with Nicolas Mouquet, David Mouillot and Emmanuel Douzery (all at the UM2). The project consisted mostly in incorporating phylogenetic and functional diversity into the mapping of diversity of fish in the Mediterranean Sea. The project was obviously too ambitious for just one year of research, as we actually needed to build the phylogeny of the species involved as well as the species traits database. However this project was followed up by several extensions, and a similar project using bird data in France in close collaboration with Vincent Devictor (FABIO project). Then I moved on to a different postdoc in the same topic within a project led by Wilfried Thuiller (Diversitalp project) and using alpine plant data to address the same types of questions. Within these three projects we developed community simulations to ask whether or not the use of phylogenetic and functional diversity could help link metacommunity theory to empirical diversity patterns. We also applied the same type of analysis within French birds, Mediterranean fish, and alpine plant communities, and organized a large workshop and seminar series that resulted in a review paper publish in Biological Reviews regarding recent advances in ecophylogenetics.
Diversity and conservation
My original training at UC Davis was on Ecology with emphasis in Conservation Biology. Conservation has therefore always been in the background on most of my projects, including those applied to agricultural settings. However, this part of my research was probably more obvious on my early career. My PhD thesis included a chapter on systematic conservation planning in the Chilean temperate forests for ex.
Bats of the Chilean temperate rainforest: elucidating patterns of landscape occurrence and use in a mosaic of land-use types within a South American biodiversity hotspot.
This was a project funded by an exploration grant from the National Geographic that I led in collaboration with Winifred Frick (University of California, Santa Cruz), Paul Heady (Bat research group, California) and Mauricio Soto-Gamboa (Universidad Austral de Chile) between 2009 and 2010 to study bat diversity. The goal of this study was to actually compare bat communities between native temperate forests and nearby eucalyptus plantations. Because a large part of the native forests in the area have been replaced with pine or eucalyptus plantations, we thought that this question would be very important for species that cannot dwell on plantations.