PhD student: Sandrine Fanfard, Thesis directors : Jean-Marc Guarini et François Charles
Thesis defended the 13th of December 2016
Either adrift or submerged, coarse debris derived from terrestrial plants provide energy and nutrients for marine ecosystems. By considering this allochtonous organic material, the goals of my PhD were to describe the assembly process of macrobenthic communities around food sources and to consider the feedback effect of the observed communities on the geochemical fate of the resource. To do so, I combined in situ experiments and modelling with the intention to build a consistent, quantitative description of the ecogeochemical link between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Using leaf litter and dead wood, this approach allowed: (i) to show the importance of biotic interactions from the beginning of the community assembly process, (ii) to make the explicit connection between the resource consumption and the population dynamics of the consumers, and (iii) and to test how resource processing is affected by the specific diversity of the communities.
« Community-Resource » relationship : case of communities of marine benthic invertebrates exploiting coarse debris derived from terrestrial plants
© 2024 LECOB