Cereal cultivars innovations adapted to organic production: A new challenge

To face and better manage the development of new varieties in a society calling for more and more transparency, the French National Research Institute (INRA) has get involved in an ambitious reflexive program about the question of "impacts, acceptability and management of varietal innovations" engaging all its thematic research departments. New collaboration between social and technical sciences are promoted to produce, from exemplary case studies, generic concepts and tools to assess the different types of impact of a new variety. Breeding and management of new genetic materials adapted to organic farming conditions constitute an appropriate theme to develop such an integrated process. A pluridisciplinary research team, associating plant breeders, soil scientists, ecologists, agronomists, economists, sociologists, in close collaboration with professionals , will try to assess both the agroenvironmental and socioeconomic impacts of changes, by studying current dynamics around original durum wheat and rice cultivars adapted to organic production in different territories

An integrated study of the development of organic rice cultivation in the Camargue (France)-

In the Camargue, rice and durum wheat are associated in rotations that have an ambivalent ecological impact: on the one hand, these two crops contribute to the preservation of the surrounding ecosystem, while on the other hand, when cropped intensively, they can threaten the ecological equilibrium of this protected area. In this context, organic agriculture would seem to be an alternative adopted by a certain number of producers and processors. However, the pioneers of this practice encounter numerous problems, both agronomic and economic. The study presented here aims: to construct a pluridisciplinary approach to analyse the conditions of the development of organic cereal cultivation in the Camargue: to identify the principal factors that limit the development of this new practice: to produce knowledge useful in helping ricegrowers put into practice organic cropping systems

La construction d’une démarche interdisciplinaire à partir de l’émergence de la céréaliculture biologique en Camargue: le projet CEBIOCA

La céréaliculture biologique apparait comme une alternative aux modes de production conventionnels, pour un nombre croissant d'agriculteurs de Camargue. Le programme CEBIOCA cherche à appuyer le développement de ce prototype d'agriculture en favorisant l'élaboration de pratiques agricoles pertinentes, la production de matériel végétal adapté et la mesure des impacts de la conversion à l'AB. Un groupe de travail interdisciplinaire, associant génétique, agronomie, malherbologie, écologie et sociologie s'est constitué à l'occasion de la réponse à l'appel d'offre CIAB et au cours de la première phase de fonctionnemet qui est présenté ici. Malgré certaines lacunes ou faiblesses dans la construction interdiciplinaire, les résultats font entrevoir des perspectives prometteuses,dans un contexte plus favorable, à condition que les partenariats scientifiques et professionnles soient renforcés

Experimental calibration of Mn incorporation in foraminiferal calcite

International audienc

Obstacles, levers and impacts of organic farming development in Camargue

We are presenting an analysis of the obstacles and levers for the development of organic cropping systems in Camargue, documented with a multicriteria analysis of scenarios of organic farming (OF) development. This communication is built using results from on-farm agronomic monitoring, stakeholders and farmers’ interviews and the use of models for integrated assessment of scenarios. At the farm level, the obstacles are related to identification of profitable cropping systems and rotations that include enough rice, conversion being therefore risky as impacting financial management and requiring a labour reorganisation. At the regional level, the constraints are related to the absence of advisory services for technical issues, and to the lack of coordination among the different stakeholders, to the low incentive of the public policies to convert, and to a relatively opaque organization of the supply chains. At the regional level, we analysed the consequences of two scenarios related to OF development on criteria such as the rice surface area, the quantity and quality of water, energy consumption or the employment generated. These results are expected to contribute to the definition of an action plan about OF development by the local stakeholders

Impact of solid waste disposal on nutrient dynamics in a sandy catchment

Groundwaters impacted by mature landfill leachate are generally enriched in ammonium. In order to assess the dynamics of ammonium exchanges between leachates and the water system inside a sandy permeable catchment we measured ammonium, nitrate and chloride concentrations in the stream and in sediment pore waters of the streambed of a landfill impacted aquifer. Geophysical investigation methods complemented the biogeochemical survey. The studied zone is a 23 km² catchment located in a coastal lagoon area sensitive to eutrophication risk. Ammonium concentrations in the river were up to 800 µmol l−1 during low water period in summer. Three surveys of the river chemistry showed a regular increase in ammonium, nitrate and chloride concentrations along a 1 km section of the watercourse, downstream the landfill, implying that the leachate plume exfiltrates along this section. Sediment cores collected within this section showed all an increase in ammonium concentrations with depth in pore waters as a consequence of the landfill leachate dispersion, as attested by a simultaneous increase in chloride concentrations. Nitrate enrichment in the river water was due to nitrification of ammonium at the interface between groundwater and streamwater. The apparent nitrification rate obtained was within values reported for turbid estuaries, although the river contained very little suspended particulate matter. Actually, pore water chemistry suggests that nitrification occurred for the most part in subsurface permeable sediments, rather than in stream water. The overall topographic, hydrological, geochemical, and geoelectrical data set permit to estimate the extension of the chloride and ammonium plume. The estimation of the apparent ammonium plume velocity is 23 m year−1 whereas the chloride plume velocity should be 50 m year−1. The river is the outlet of the impacted groundwaters. Considering that the input of ammonium from the landfill is balanced by the present day output via the river, the residence time of ammonium in the aquifer is between 7 and 18 years

Broadband terahertz heterodyne spectrometer exploiting synchrotron radiation at megahertz resolution

International audienceA new spectrometer allowing both high resolution and broadband coverage in the terahertz (THz) domain is proposed. This instrument exploits the heterodyne technique between broadband synchrotron radiation and a quantum cascade laser (QCL) based molecular THz laser that acts as the local oscillator (LO). Proof of principle for exploitation for spectroscopy is provided by the recording of molecular absorptions of hydrogen sulfide (H 2 S) and methanol (CH 3 OH) around 1.073 THz. Ultimately, the spectrometer will enable to cover the 1-4 THz region in 5 GHz windows at Doppler resolution

Real-World Evolution Adapts Robot Morphology and Control to Hardware Limitations

For robots to handle the numerous factors that can affect them in the real world, they must adapt to changes and unexpected events. Evolutionary robotics tries to solve some of these issues by automatically optimizing a robot for a specific environment. Most of the research in this field, however, uses simplified representations of the robotic system in software simulations. The large gap between performance in simulation and the real world makes it challenging to transfer the resulting robots to the real world. In this paper, we apply real world multi-objective evolutionary optimization to optimize both control and morphology of a four-legged mammal-inspired robot. We change the supply voltage of the system, reducing the available torque and speed of all joints, and study how this affects both the fitness, as well as the morphology and control of the solutions. In addition to demonstrating that this real-world evolutionary scheme for morphology and control is indeed feasible with relatively few evaluations, we show that evolution under the different hardware limitations results in comparable performance for low and moderate speeds, and that the search achieves this by adapting both the control and the morphology of the robot.Comment: Accepted to the 2018 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO