Field notes from Belém — teaching R in the Amazon gateway
A week in Belém, Brazil, teaching functional ecology and R to graduate students at the edge of the Amazon. On biodiversity, heat, açaí, and the strange privilege of doing science here.
Field practicals on the Touch river — fish sampling with UPS students
On 21 April 2026, students from Université Paul Sabatier joined us for a full day of fish electrofishing and morphometric data collection on the Touch river, south-west of Toulouse. A first encounter with freshwater fish ecology in the field — mud included.
CFBBA Chair Grant — Building an Intraspecific Trait Database for Amazonian Freshwater Fishes
Our project has been selected for the inaugural call of the Franco-Brazilian Chair Network (CFBBA), supporting reciprocal mobility between CNRS/CRBE Toulouse and the Universidade Federal do Pará. The project will build the first intraspecific trait database for Amazonian freshwater fishes — a direct extension of the INTRAIT fieldwork conducted in French Guiana.
What Shapes the Differences Between Freshwater Fish Communities Worldwide?
Freshwater ecosystems host a disproportionate share of global biodiversity, yet they are among the most fragmented and threatened systems on Earth. While global patterns of freshwater fish species richness are now relatively well documented, much less is known about what drives differences in community composition between river basins—that is, beta diversity. In a recent study published in Global Ecology and Biogeography, we provide the first global, integrative analysis of taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic beta diversity in freshwater fishes, and disentangle the ecological and historical processes shaping these patterns across the world’s river basins
Field mission INTRAIT — freshwater fish morphology along the Maroni river, French Guiana
In November 2025, our team from CRBE travelled to French Guiana to sample freshwater fish along the Maroni river as part of the INTRAIT project. We collected 1,408 individuals from ~76 species across four sites spanning a gradient of human pressure — the raw material for quantifying intraspecific morphological variation in tropical fish assemblages.
Teaching functional ecology in R — Master FBE, EUR TULIP-GS
In September 2025, I taught a course on functional ecology and R to Master FBE students at the EUR TULIP Graduate School in Toulouse. An overview of the course content, audience, and the pedagogical choices behind it.
New paper accepted in Nature on global patterns of 'dark diversity' in plants
The first article of our DarkDivNet consortium, led by Meelis Pärtel, has been published in Nature. Our dataset from 5500 sites in 119 world regions, collected specially for this purpose, shows that plant diversity is negatively affected not only by direct human impact such as local disturbance.
We are looking for a PhD candidate !!
New paper accepted in Ecology Letters
In this paper, we aim to understand the consequences of species composition changes on the functional and phylogenetic diversity of birds across the world
Estonian Research Award
New position in CNRS
Researcher position in Toulouse