ECOCONTROL:

Project financing:

Total budget: 2 999 976 €

PSH budget: 130 751 €

Financier: ANR

Duration: 60 months (01/03/2025 to 28/02/2029)

Abstract:

This project aims to improve our understanding of arthropod regulatory services and identify agroecological levers to enhance natural pest regulation in agriculture at both local and territorial levels, in continental France, Corsica and Guadeloupe. To achieve this goal, we will combine fieldwork with innovative conceptual and numerical approaches. We will address the following classical though not yet answered question: How do biotic and abiotic factors, whether phylogenetic, environmental, related to farming practices or to the introduction of alien species, influence the structure and dynamics of interaction networks between plants (cultivated or not), pests (indigenous or introduced), and their natural enemies (predators /parasitoids)? Our target model agronomic systems are citrus, apple and olive tree crops, as well as market gardening. We will explore landscape structure and composition gradients and farmer profiles with a varying degree of use of chemicals and ecological management approaches (e.g. service plants). The target insects are phytophagous and sap-feeders of economic importance (aphids, mealy bugs, miners, fruit flies, psyllids, stink bug and vectors of X. fastidiosa), and their natural enemies (arthropod predators and parasitoids). Our transdisciplinary consortium comprises 50 scientists from 4 research institutes (INRAE, INRIA, CNRS, CIRAD) and 5 Higher Education institutions (Institut Agro, AgroParisTech, Univ. Côte d’Azur, Sorbonne, Rennes 2). In the course of this project, we will:

1) Develop Natural Language Processing methods to extract complex biological interactions and species traits from literature sources by seamlessly combining graph and text information,

2) Combine real-time sequencing and AI-assisted image recognition of insects to massively characterize insect communities and their trophic interactions from our field sampling,

3) Combine innovative machine learning approaches to impute missing links in local networks and to identify local parasitoids capable of controlling any introduced insect as well as the potential undesirable effects of the introduction of an exogenous auxiliary for biocontrol purposes,

4) Develop ad hoc theory in community ecology to characterize what is the process/function of regulation, and to decipher when and how regulation emerges from biotic interactions in arthropod networks,

5) Adapt AI and statistical methods to develop a space-time-continuous understanding of ecological networks and pest-regulation, and to identify levers at landscape/territory scale favorable to natural regulation,

6) Set up a digital platform to share data, protocols and analytical workflows.

Importantly, we will embed our work within a socio-agroecosystem framework by conducting sampling on volunteer farmers' fields, whether they are individuals, members of large professional networks or partners of INRAE’s national networks, thereby raising awareness on natural regulations. Through sociological studies on farmers' willingness to share with and use information from research, together with a collective reflection with surveillance stakeholders, we will lay the groundwork for a future epidemiological surveillance platform expanded to natural regulation and providing intelligible information on practices to improve it. We will take advantage of our consortium's ties to universities and top-tier agricultural schools to introduce the project methods and outcomes to future plant protection professionals. Aside, the general public will be invited to citizens’ science cafés to further shape a socioecosystem favorable to the agroecological transition. Although developed on target networks, all concepts and tools will be generic enough to be transferred to other crops, pests and natural enemies’ networks to help identify agroecological levers for both pest and pesticide reduction.

Project partners:

AgroParisTech, Institut Agro Rennes-Anger, Sorbonne Université, Université Côte d’Azur, Université Rennes II Haute Bretagne, CIRAD, CNRS, INRAE, INRIA