Jonathan Lenoir, Maître de Conférences à l’Université de Picardie Jules Verne, participera au workshop international HETEROCLIM : la réponse des organismes au changement climatique dans un environnement hétérogène.

Ce workshop est organisé par l’Institut de Recherche sur la Biologie de l’Insecte (UMR 7261 – Université de Tours) et se tiendra à Loches du 10 au 14 juin 2014.

Le comité scientifique sera composé de Sylvain Pincebourde, Olivier Dangles, Jerome Casas et Brian Helmuth.

Aim & scoop

Past and ongoing global warming has dramatic impacts on ecological systems, including changes in species distributions and erosion of biodiversity. Very recently, scientists working on climate change biology realized that the environmental heterogeneity could be an important driver because, theoretically, organisms may move within local/regional spatial scales to find suitable micro-habitats as climate is changing, buffering thereby the amplitude of global warming. Thermal environments are not only quite heterogeneous in the natural habitat for most species, but they are also extremely variable through time. The inclusion of organismal responses to spatio-temporal heterogeneity into models predicting climate change effects has been little explored. Nevertheless, very recent findings offer promising advancements that will be covered by this workshop.

Our general aim is to bring together leading scientists from various key disciplines to promote interconnections between their different expertise and skills, with the ambition to stimulate the emergence of new developments related to scale issues in thermal ecology and global change biology. Such advances are necessary to anticipate and attenuate the impacts of global warming on ecological systems and societies. The workshop involves 3 sessions:

– Connecting global and local climate change: this session will focus on the downscaling methods used to link macro- and micro-climates to global climatic models, including weather generators that are needed in forecasting studies.

– Thermal performance of organisms in fluctuating environments: the latest advancements on the ecological and physiological responses of organisms to fluctuating conditions will be covered, with particular emphasis on the importance of temporal scales of fluctuations.

– Modeling distribution of organisms in space and time: statistical and mechanistic modeling approaches will be covered to stimulate the development of mixed models that could provide innovative predictive framework of species’ response to climate variability.