POST-DOC at INRA, France
Topic: Which criteria to optimise weed multi-functionality across landscapes?
The position will be based in INRA Dijon with regular visits to INRA Toulouse.
Potential candidates should contact Sabrina Gaba, Nathalie Peyrard or RĂ©gis Sabbadin directly:
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The selected candidate and the group at INRA will build a detailed research project which will subsequently be evaluated by Agreenskills. The Agreenskills selection procedure can be viewed
on their website below. http://www.agreenskills.eu/agreenskills-cms/
Research proposal description:
There has been a growing interest in maintaining ecological services in agricultural landscapes since the release of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) and the policies (e.g. Plan Ecophyto 2018). However, many issues still remain to be tackled to fully integrate the concept of services into everyday landscape planning, management and decision-making. In particular, the quantitative relationship between biodiversity, (agro)ecosystem processes, services and land use is still poorly understood. In agroecosystems, weeds provide goods and services i.e. pollination but also disservices as they induce yield loss due to competition with crops. Therefore, an agroecological weed management strategy has to face a trade-off between food provisioning and regulation services provided by weeds. One way to resolve this trade-off is to design spatio-temporal management strategies at the scale of the landscape and evaluate their impact on the capacity of the landscape to provide services.
This post-doc is devoted to the evaluation of such strategies, which requires to :
1.
develop criteria and indicators evaluating the different (possibly conflicting) services provided by weeds, as well as the constraints bearing on weeds management actions (cropping systems, labor and material resources...). These criteria and constraints may hold at different spatial scales, but do not involve weeds dynamics.
2.
model the spatio-temporal dynamics of the weeds/crop/human system under some fixed weed management strategies at the landscape scale.
The criteria, constraints and dynamics models will be mathematically formalized and used jointly to build a management strategy evaluation tool. An experimental (in silico) comparison of existing and expert weed management strategies will be led.
A PhD project will start in October 2012 on new methods for the design of strategies for the management of spatio-temporal processes. The PhD student will exploit the postdoc work on criteria/constraints, while both will have to cooperate on the elaboration spatio-temporal models and the experimental evaluation of the strategies.
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