Postdoctoral Fellow
Research group | Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis
Main supervisor | Torbj?rn H?kan Ergon
Co-supervisor | -
Affiliation | Department of Biosciences, UiO
Contact | etienne.lalechere@ibv.uio.no
Short bio
I’m currently a MSCA DSTrain postdoctoral fellow. My research activities have been part of multidisciplinary ecological modelling projects. In this context, I aim to develop collaborations to foster the emergence of new paradigms in ecology. I like to think creatively and to translate ideas into practice up to the communication of research results. My current project (BIODIVTRENDS) enables me to demonstrate the interest of combining the development of new ecological models and computational methods with the increasing availability of open data. The aim is to improve current ecological theory and to understand and mitigate the future impacts of societies on biodiversity and ecosystems.
Research interests and hobbies
I study the responses of animals and plants to changes in climate, land cover and land use. The aim is to improve our knowledge of the effects of past global changes on current species and communities in order to better inform future biodiversity trends. I use both retrospective and prospective analyses to project environmental and biodiversity dynamics over decades and centuries. These approaches allow me to understand whether biodiversity is able to track global changes.
My research on landscape connectivity and protected areas aims to support conservation planning and to improve the functionality of green veinings. To reach this goal, remote sensing of the structure and the composition of ecosystems helps me to understand their functional changes. The combination of ecological modelling and scenario comparison allows me to prioritize conservation and management actions.
Aside from my research, I like spending time enjoying the outdoors hiking and climbing with friends or family.
DSTrain project
BIODIVTRENDS
Improving knowledge about the effects of past land use and climate changes on current communities to better inform future biodiversity trends.
Species and community responses to environmental change are not instantaneous, which means that species are not necessarily in equilibrium with current environmental conditions, but may still depend on past conditions. Time-lagged responses have already been quantified in several ways, arguing that species distribution and current community composition still depend on past land use and climate changes. However, it is still unknown how far back in time we need to go to account for the full effects of global changes on current species and communities. We also lack knowledge about how the effects of these drivers decrease as we go back in time. Understanding this is particularly important to anticipate future biodiversity trends and to adopt long-term conservation strategies.
To overcome this lack of knowledge, we aim at developing a new conceptual framework associated with an underlying modelling approach. We will illustrate our approach on the distribution of different taxa in response to past trajectories of change in land use and climate. We expect that species distribution models (SDMs) that do account for disequilibrium dynamics will outperform traditional SDMs that rely on the equilibrium assumption, and that it depends to various degrees on species functional characteristics. Then, we will show how improving our understanding of past species-environment relationships will allow us to predict more realistic projections of future species distribution. Finally, we will use spatial analysis to evaluate the potential discrepancy between current protected areas and the areas that concentrate future decline of species, in order to suggest prioritization of conservation and restoration actions.
In conclusion, this project aim to develop a non-equilibrium SDM framework to capture and account for time lag dynamics when modelling current species distributions. This framework will help to relax the equilibrium assumption of traditional SDMs and will be used to improve future projections of biodiversity in order to feed conservation strategies in response to global changes.
Publications
DSTrain publications
Lalechère E., Lenoir J., Kühn I., Marrec R., Ergon T. (in prep) Assessing biodiversity trends in a ceaseless disequilibrium state. Trends in Ecology & Evolution.
Lalechère E., Marrec R., Lenoir J. (accepted) A non-equilibrium species distribution model reveals unprecedented depth of time lag responses to past environmental change trajectories. Ecology Letters.
Previous publications
Lalechère E., Monnet J., Breen J., Fuhr M. (2024) Assessing the potential of remote sensing-based models to predict old-growth forests on large spatiotemporal scales. Journal of Environmental Management, 351, 119865. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2023.119865
Laslier M., Lalechère E., Gril E., Ferrer N., Lenoir J. (2023) Mapping forest microclimates using Sentinel 1 Radar data: insights and complementarity with LiDAR and optical data. Proc. SPIE 12727, Remote Sensing for Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Hydrology XXV, 127270C. https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2679400
Fuhr M., Lalechère E., Bergès L., Monnet JM. (2022) Detecting overmature forests using ALS. Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation, 8(5), 731-743. https://doi.org/10.1002/rse2.274
Lalechère E., Bergès L. (2022) Importance of climate-induced tree species composition changes in forecasting the amount of reachable habitat for forest birds. Diversity and Distributions, 28(9), 1781-1794. https://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.13542
Lalechère E., Bergès L., Vacher J., Monnet JM., Fuhr M. (2022) Building a network of overmature forests using airborne laser scanning and landscape graphs. IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, IGARSS, pp. 5901-5904. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9884614
Lalechère E., Bergès L. (2021) A Validation Procedure for Ecological Corridor Locations. Land, 10(12), 1320. https://doi.org/10.3390/land10121320
Lalechère E., Jabot F., Archaux F., Deffuant G. (2019) Relative importance of landscape and species characteristics on extinction debt, immigration credit and relaxation time after habitat turnover. Population Ecology, 61(4), 383-395. https://doi.org/10.1002/1438-390X.12009
Aviron S., Lalechère E., Duflot R., Parisey N., Boussard B., Poggi S. (2018) Connectivity of cropped vs. semi-natural habitats mediates biodiversity: A case study of carabid beetles communities. Agriculture Ecosystems & Environment, 268, 34-43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2018.08.025
Lalechère E., Jabot F., Archaux F., Deffuant G. (2018) Projected regional forest plant community dynamics evidence centuries-long effects of habitat turnover. Journal of Vegetation Science, 29(3), 480-490. https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.12631
Lalechère E., Jabot F., Archaux F., Deffuant G. (2017) Non-equilibrium plant metapopulation dynamics challenge the concept of ancient/recent forest species. Ecological Modelling, 366, 48-57. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2017.10.008
Martel G., Aviron S., Joannon A., Lalechère E., Roche B., Boussard H. (2017) Impact of farming systems on agricultural landscapes and biodiversity: From plot to farm and landscape scales. European Journal of Agronomy, 107, 53-62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eja.2017.07.014