Overview

AMAP's research program covers several major current societal and environmental issues, as relayed by IPBES (https://www.ipbes.ne), IPCC (https://www.ipcc.ch/) and the Sustainable Development Goals (https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/fr/). Scientific challenges tackled include characterizing, understanding and predicting plant diversity and variability, the interactions between the morphogenetic plant development program and its environmental regulation, their implications for stand structure and dynamics, and assessing their agronomic and ecological consequences in natural or environmentally forced ecosystems. This research is at the confluence of rapid developments in biology, ecology and agronomy, around themes such as biological diversity, integrative biology, sustainable agriculture and forestry, agroecology, global changes, themes that are now being developed in a context of extremely rapid growth in data quantities and flows (e.g. participatory science, remote sensing) and computing resources (GPU, distributed computing, etc.). On another hand, computer science and applied mathematics are also impacted by new issues emerging from the life sciences: consideration of thematic issues and knowledge in approaches to massive data management and mining (ecoinformatics); modelling of complex systems, which raises the question of the necessary synergy between mathematical analyses of observed phenomena and predictive simulations. These issues are of increasing interest to the digital science community, which is seeking partners in the fields of life and environmental sciences for the development of interdisciplinary projects. Since its creation, AMAP has integrated mathematicians and computer scientists alongside botanists, agronomists and ecologists in the same laboratory and has contributed to the emergence of transdisciplinary approaches, particularly in biomathematics of plant architecture. More recently AMAP has continued this trajectory of interface between digital and plant sciences, with a 15% publication rate in math-info journals, the ramp-up of the Pl@ntNet participatory botany platform (6 million users in 2020), or investment in remote sensing, including LiDAR technology, for extracting biophysical parameters from forest canopies. AMAP ongoing research program is organized in 3 interconnected research main lines (Axes), each researcher contributed to several of them:

Systematics, Biogeography, Ecology

Origin of species and biodiversity; Past, present and future biodiversity dynamics; Biodiversity management and conservation

Dynamics and production of plants and plant communities

Growth, resource allocation, and development of structures and functions in plants; individual plasticity related to environmental forcing and overall stand dynamics; vegetation role in landscape structure and biogeochemical cycles

Models, analyses and data, from organs to ecosystems

Portability of machine learning approaches to unstructured data and metadata; constraints in mesoscale approaches (scaling) and identification of system emergent properties when scaling; implementation of heterogeneous approaches (e.g. discrete/continuous) for complex system modeling; development of hybrid approaches (data-driven and mechanistic models)