Corentin DOURMAP is PhD student at iEES Paris. Last March 19th he participated in the final contest of Alliance Sorbonne Université of the Ma Thèse en 180 secondes contest. He has been able to describe simply his PhD project which consist in studying the seed development. He used a metaphor to be understood by general public: the building of a shelving unit. Watch the video of his performance.

Climate changeaffectsbiodiversity globally, by forcing species to shift their distribution to track the changes in temperature. An international collaboration between scientists from France, Sweden, the Netherlands and Finland shows, in an article published in the journal Ecology Letters,that habitat fragmentation caused by human activity affects distribution shifts in butterfly species and, hence, their capacity to cope with climate change.

Urbanization changes the composition of pollinating insect communities. But who are the winners and losers of this environmental filter? Vincent Zaninotto and his collaborators attempt to answer this question in an article published in the journal Insects, comparing the diversity of pollinators in natural environments and in Parisian green spaces.