Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry

ANR MODECOL: Using mathematical MODeling to improve ECOLogical services of prairial ecosystems

Participant : Nicolas Champagnat.

This research project is part of the SYSCOMM ANR program (Complex Systems and Mathematical Modeling).

The general goal of this project is to develop computational ecological modeling of terrestrial plant community via the simulation of a prairie (e.g. interactive terrestrial plant populations) in relation with environmental data. This project focuses on developing an original tool-box that takes advantage of complementary mathematical disciplines to assess ecological problems. Our project proposes the coupling of Partial Differential Equation to approximate environmental conditions and Individual-Based stochastic Models to integrate the population dynamics of prairies. Simulations will be extensively processed thanks to the use of new tools in distributed computing and webcomputing.

An application is proposed as part of this project that stands at the boundary between agronomical and ecological sciences. It concerns the recent European Common Agricultural Policy which requires setting up herbal strips around intensive cereal fields for purificating water from extra nitrate and pesticides. This application will be developed directly with the end-users. We aim to provide softwares in prairies engineering that could be used as a support for decision making concerning this new policy.