MUSCAD

Multiscale Assessment of Plant Diversity in Wooded Pastures of the Jura Mountains

Type : PhD. Cotutelle between the laboratory of chrono-ecology (Uni. of Franche-Comté) and the laboratory ECOSPAT (Uni. of Lausanne) (2003-2006)

Fund : 

  • Grant CNRS-Region
  • Antenne Romande WSL

 

Description : 

Patterns of biodiversity have been of long-standing interest to ecologists, particularlyat regional and global scales. As the lossof biodiversity becomes of greaterenvironmental, social and politicalconcern, understanding the drivers of localbiodiversity in natural and anthropogenicecosystems is of an increasingly practicalinterest in conservation.

In the Jura Mountains, wooded pasturesare the result of traditional humanactivities, mainly forest management andextensive cattle grazing. This culturallandscape is particularly rich in plantspecies and we hypothesise that thediversity is closely related to theenvironmental heterogeneity of the systemat multiple scalewww.wsl.ch/staff/helene.wagner/s.

How to describe landscape in order toexplain and predict plant diversity in agiven place ? This is the main question ofMUSCAD project.

 

Keywords : 

Plant biodiversity, spatial analysis, remote sensing, GIS, multiscale, species assemblage, species richness, wooded pastures

 

Particpants : 

PhD student : A. Dufour

Supervisors :

 

Partnerships : 

  • WSL Antenne romande
  • NCCR “Plant Survival”, module “Pattern and long-term changes in pasture-woodlands: Complex plant-herbivore interactions in a traditional type of agro-forestry

 

Study site :

Les Amburnex, Marchairuz, Parc Jurassien Vaudois

Project

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