When the Sahel is mentioned today, this semi-arid African region between the Sahara and Sudanian Africa is often associated with the notion of desertification. But what do the latest advances in environmental science tell us about this desertification? To what extent is the “narrative” of Sahel desertification based on scientific results, or on other mechanisms, of a more political nature?
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This study unraveled the impacts of accelerated aging pace as a corollary of climate-driven population decline. We found transgenerational accumulation of telomere shortening implying that offspring were already born “old”. We suggest that this process may exacerbate across generations, leading to an aging loop in the population. This model posits that telomere dynamics should represent a molecular biomarker of extirpation, and likely a central cause and promising solution for future biodiversity managing actions.
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🔗 Carbon Sinks | CNRS Images
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Results, published in Communications Biology , suggest that the evolution of a virus integrated into a eukaryotic genome is totally different when it is useful to the organism that carries it.
Based on the use of a smartphone application, the citizens of the three villages were invited to report water color changes, as these changes could reflect cyanobacteria proliferations.
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“Here, we used 37 years of mark-recapture data in two nearby habitats inside a meadow viper Vipera ursinii population to quantify life expectancies, generation times and the shape of actuarial and reproductive senescence.”
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We were saddened to learn on this the 1st day of September that our colleague and friend Christian Peeters, CNRS senior scientist at iEES-Paris, had passed away.
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Soil carbon persistence can be understood through the lens of decomposers as a result of functional complexity derived from the interplay between spatial and temporal variation of molecular diversity and composition. For example, co-location alone can determine whether a molecule is decomposed, with rapid changes in moisture leading to transport of organic matter and constraining the fitness of the microbial community, while greater molecular diversity may increase the metabolic demand of, and thus potentially limit, decomposition.
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2 Youtube channels were created during the confinement by Christian Peeters, DR CNRS. Secrets of ants Ant Life Secrets of ants Ant Life
Smaller organisms are typically more abundant than larger ones, which is a fundamental characteristic of ecological communities. How environmental pulse disturbances affect these « abundance pyramids » remains poorly understood. In a study recently published in Ecology Letters, researchers from iEES Paris and the University of Zürich showed that disturbances which are not size-selective still […]
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