A multidisciplinary modelling approach to analyse and predict the effects of landscape dynamics on biodiversity

Over the last 40 years, agricultural extension and intensification of land use have induced profound changes in distribution and dynamics of farmland biodiversity and in the functioning of European agroecosystems. Agroecosystems are mainly private properties, whose dynamics need to be better understood in order to preserve their biodiversity. Several French research teams have recently joined their skills in a multi-disciplinary project, BiodivAgriM, whose main goal is to test, validate, and predict the consequences of different scenarii of landscape changes on the distribution, abundance and persistence of biodiversity in agroecosystems. A central goal of this project is to generate a multi-purpose modelling platform which makes it possible to couple different spatially explicit models toward the same objective, and gather rather similar models toward the same generic object (i.e., the landscape). Such a modelling approach is a real challenge. The main knowledge provided by this project was that the disciplines involved were in various maturation stages, with respect to the modelling approach, to understand the impacts of agricultural practices on biodiversity. Yet, a large panel of models is today available to address more specific questions, between human drivers and landscape, global incentives and landscape, or landscape and species. All of them are presently coupled or/and compared in order to qualify less ambitious yet relevant processes related to the landscape.