La science au profit du développement transfrontalier

TREBEDIV aims to promote collaboration between researchers from Brazil and French Guiana through the development of a joint research agenda on the study of Amazonian forest diversity. This project relates to a recently funded ANR Blanc project (NEBEDIV) investigating tropical forest beta-diversity in French Guiana and Amazonas, Brazil, but it also will interface with a broader partnership that includes research in Peru from already established international collaborations.Tropical plant diversity is extraordinarily high both at local and regional scales, including a significant component of beta-diversity, or the turnover in species composition across habitats and regions. Yet we still know little about the factors underlying species distributions, with more than half of all tropical plant species having been collected only once. In particular, the relative roles of biogeography, abiotic factors, and biotic factors in limiting plant species distributions remain a subject of debate. 

Natural enemies (both fungi and insect herbivores) have recently been shown to exert strong forces on plant community composition, and it has been hypothesized that such biotic interactions are far more important in driving plant species turnover than other environmental drivers. Alternatively, natural enemies may be important at small scales, (local diversity) but may not influence turnover at the beta scale. 

TREBEDIV project gives emphasis on capacity building of graduate students in both theory and methods for studying tropical forest diversity, function and dynamics, with students conducting specific thesis projects within the general goals of the NEBEDIV umbrella project. 

Thanks to mobility, researchers and students are conducting comparative studies between French Guianan and Brazilian forest communities. Two annual four-week long intensive courses and analytical workshops, including professors and students from France and Brazil have been organised to promote comparative research across the entire Amazon region, with the major goal of conducting a comprehensive evaluation of tropical forest beta-diversity across broad geographic and environmental gradients.  

•Coordinateurs :Christopher Baraloto, INRA, UMR EcoFog et Alberto Vicentini, INPA

•Autres institutions impliquées :CNRS, université Paul Sabatier Toulouse