It is now widely acknowledged that the still ongoing explosion of the human population has fostered the emergence of a series of environmental crises with potentially paramount impacts on the stability of the global ecosystem. Humanity now consumes resources at a faster pace than they are naturally renewed even at the global scale, and the expressions ‘Food limitation’ ‘global warming’, ‘climate change’, ‘biodiversity loss’, ‘habitat loss and fragmentation’, ‘pollution’ all describe various interconnected facets at different scales of a single and massive process of global change that has been going on for two centuries.

For forty years, our knowledge on the mechanisms that govern organisms to ecosystem functioning allowed us to design, test and propose new approaches enabling the sustainable management of the environment in relation to human activities in the domains of agriculture, ecology and conservation.

Our ambition today is to train and attract the best and brightest minds to design sustainable practices in all environmental areas, to amplify our unique interdisciplinary approach to help designing new knowledge-based decision-making tools allowing our societies to take informed decisions that are biologically and ecologically friendly, while accounting for their potential economical and societal viability.