About me
You reached my personal page! You will find here an overview of my projects, both within and outside science.
I am always curious about the natural world, and a quantitative ecologist by training. I have been lucky to work with many organisms, ranging from plants to birds, and in many different natural settings, both on land and in the sea. I try to share this experience with others, and synthesize it into useful knowledge to help us understand how natural systems are changing.
Research
I am currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow, working closely with the Copernicus Institute (U. Utrecht, Netherlands) and the marine research station ECIM (U. Católica, Chile).
While my research interests span a broad variety of topics within the realm of ecology, my recent work is focused on exploring how ecological interactions shape the response of ecosystems to perturbations. My methods include ecological surveys, data analysis and mathematical modelling. I also develop scientific software to speed up the application of theoretical ideas to real ecosystems.
Current projects:
Using a combination of ecological modelling, empirical surveys and analyses of spatial patterns, we investigate how measuring the current spatial structure of reefs can help us forecast their future. Check out our website!
I contribute to developing indicators of ecosystem degradation based on their stability properties and spatial structure, using (e.g.) aerial images. I created and update regularly an R package, spatialwarnings to compute these indicators in real and model ecological systems (see Génin et al. 2018).
Past projects:
We use extensive plant surveys to explore how resilient subalpine meadows are to grazing and climate change in Californian National Parks (see Lee et al., 2017, Génin et al. 2020).
Using vegetation surveys and modelling, we explore the interplay between the resilience of vegetation communities and plant-plant interactions in the protected semi-arid grassland of La Crau, France (see Génin et al. 2021).
Nature and Photography
As many ecologists, I am fond of wildlife, which makes me embark on various nature-related adventures.
Poids-plume (Featherweight in french) is a collaborative experiment, based on Raspberry-pi-powered feeders that weigh and take videos of birds (and other visitors!). Feel free to visit the home page of the experiment. Please contact us if you would like to join the experiment!
A collective blog (in french) that aims at teaching the spark of knowledge we need to read and understand our natural environment !
I am an enthusiastic although occasional photographer. I maintain here a regular blog with pictures from travels, field work or just daily walks. Whatever comes, really !
News ↓
New paper! Grazing and the vanishing complexity of plant association networks in grasslands, Oikos [Blog Post]
New paper! Mapping hotspots of potential ecosystem fragility, Biological Conservation