Coordinators: Serge Morand (Montpellier University 2) and Chantal Dorthe (INRA)

The term ‘biodiversity’ designates the variety of life forms at all organization levels, including genes, populations, communities and ecosystems, as well as humans because of their interactions with all biodiversity components.

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• Foreword: Issues, approaches and prospects for biodiversity research
• Origin and evolution of biodiversity
• Functional biodiversity
• Societies and biodiversity
• Modelling - biodiversity scenarios
• Biodiversity - a citizen science
• Topics covered by the research teams
• Training at Agropolis International

List of acronyms and abbreviations

Coordinator : Jacques Wery, UMR System

The 2006–2008 food crisis and the accompanying hunger riots put agriculture and its crucial role under the media and political spotlight, hence revealing the essential role that agricultural sciences will have to play in the coming years.

Agronomists are indeed facing a major challenge—to invent and promote agricultural systems capable of providing a sufficient volume of top quality products to feed around 9 billion people in the future, thus ensuring peoples’ well-being and health, while also minimizing the environmental footprint of farming.

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• Foreword: Current agronomy issues, approaches and complementary features
• Ensuring top quality, high quantity production
• Minimizing the impact of cropping on biogeochemical cycles
• Managing pests and optimizing pesticide use
• Preserving water resources
• Developing and disseminating innovations
• Topics covered by the research teams
• Involvement in international networks
• Training at Agropolis International

List of acronyms and abbreviations

Coordonnator: Oliver Oliveros (DURAS Project Coordinator)

DURAS Project is like no other. It was designed to support the facilitation role of the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) in its effort to promote the opening up of the agricultural research system, particularly by ensuring that research priorities are identified in a participatory fashion and that the less vocal stakeholders, most notably civil society groups, are mobilized and able to meaningfully participate in agricultural research for development (ARD) processes. It was also conceived so that stakeholders could share and exchange information through available interactive regional agricultural information systems.
At the heart of DURAS is its competitive grants system. Following an original selection and evaluation process that put a premium on building multi-stakeholder partnership, 12 projects were funded over a period of about three years, each involving an array of disciplines and partners from around the world.
This special issue of Dossier d’Agropolis is devoted to these 12 projects. Each article is written by the project participants. It is an attempt to capture in a few pages what is otherwise a complex, if not complicated, experience and the context within which these partnerships were built. It also presents some key results and some lessons learned along the way.

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• DURAS Project: Innovative partnerships for sustainable development
• 12 DURAS projects
• Local poultry: A rural development resource in West Africa
• A regional network of multi-stakeholder platforms for a participatory evaluation of banana and plantain varieties
• Farmer Access to Innovation Resources
• Cultivated ecosystem management in the Cameroon rainforest zone: identification of stakeholders and constraints on sustainability
• Local knowledge and husbandry integration for uplands reclamation in Vietnam and Laos
• Restoring soil fertility and sustaining agropastoral systems in sub-Saharan Africa using organic fertiliser
• Sustainable management of plant-parasitic nematodes in the Mediterranean and Sahelian market gardening systems
• Farmers and researchers join forces to spur West African agriculture through symbiotic microorganisms
• Supporting small farmers through the establishment of geographical indications in southern Africa
• Improving the pig industry to enable small producers to meet consumer expectations in Vietnam and Cambodia
• Partnership networks to support the poor in Vietnam and Kenya in the management of agricultural SMEs
• Production of quality sorghum or millet malt for small-scale or semi-industrial food production in West Africa
• DURAS project workshop
• List of acronyms and abbreviations

Coordonnators: Yves Savidan (Agropolis International, France) - Pedro Arcuri (Embrapa, Brazil)

The research competences of Montpellier and the Languedoc-Roussillon region within the framework of Labex Europe.

This special Agropolis International Dossier devoted to ‘Partnership’ describes the teachings of seven years of functioning of Labex-Europe. Teachings that Embrapa and Agropolis International wish to share.

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Table of content :

• A Brazilian innovation    
  

• The three themes addressed at Labex Europe
  - Management of natural resources    
  - Agrifood technologies    
  - Genomics and plant biotechnology    

• International Advanced Biology Consortium    

• Labex Europe: what the French teams learned    

• The challenges of coordination    
• The prospects of Labex Europe    
  - The French point of view    
  - The Brazilian point of view    
  

Main publications    

The Labex Europe and training    

The Euraxess Languedoc-Roussillon Centre    

Acronyms and abbreviations    

Coordinator : Pascal Kosuth (Director of UMR TETIS and the Remote Sensing Center, Montpellier, France)

Access to airborne and satellite technology for Earth Observation is a major methodological boon for researchers. This ‘altitude gain’ for monitoring has led to the development of a new approach to assessing territories, providing an overview of the target area and clarifying the distribution of elements within this area. The quality and accuracy of the remote sensing tool are continually being improved.

The increase in the number of spaceborne sensors and progress achieved in signal processing have generated new information that can in turn be used in a broad range of scientific fields as well as for decision support.

This is the first Dossier devoted to a research and action tool. It presents research on improving this tool, along with examples of its applications to meet needs on different topics.

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• Satellite and airborne remote sensing
• Spatial analysis and spatiotemporal modelling methods
• Information systems and observatories
• Spatial information applications in different fields
  - Agriculture, fisheries and forestry
  - Environment
  - Land-use planning, Risks
  - Populations and societies
• Topics covered by the research teams
• Training at Agropolis International
• List of acronyms and abbreviations

Coordonnators : Benoît Jaillard (INRA) et Roland Poss (IRD)

Agropolis International pools several hundreds of scientists involved in soil research and teaching–it is a major European hub of activities in this field, as highlighted in the present document. This Dossier was certified by the French committee of the International Year of Planet Earth, which aims to boost awareness on the role of Earth sciences in the development of human societies.

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• Soils produce food and clothing for people
• Soils regulate inland water flow
• Soils regulate biogeochemical nutrient and pollutant cycling
• Soils are living environments that harbour multifunctional organisms
• Soils maintain an evolutionary record of ecosystems and humankind

Topics covered by the research teams

Training at Agropolis International

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Coordonnator : Pierre-Marie Bosc (UMR MOISA)

As part of the Université de Montpellier Sud de France initiative, Agropolis International pools 24 multidisciplinary research units focused on these topics, including around 700 researchers and teacher researchers supervising 500 PhD candidates. They form four thematic units that represent pivotal points whose boundaries are flexible due to the complexity of the phenomena involved and global interdependence.

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• Foreword: World agriculture a key challenge for societies

• Territorial dynamics and changes in production systems

• Subsectors, standards, markets and stakeholder strategies

• Environment and natural resource management

• Public goods, policies and international regulations

• Methods and tools tailored to a diverse range of issues

• Collective expertise to address social issues

Topics covered by the research teams

Montpellier Social Sciences and Humanities Research Institute

Training at Agropolis International

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Coordonnator : Gilles Boeuf (Laboratoire Arago, Banyuls, UMR 7628, CNRS/UPMC)

Languedoc-Roussillon Region, particularly Montpellier, have recognized long-standing experience in this respect, while hosting many institutions and research units that can be mobilized to focus on aquatic ecosystems and their development: 23 laboratories involving five universities, the CNRS, four specialised institutes and two mixed bodies.
This research capacity, the third in France in this field, is supplemented by education and training modules delivering 13 types of diplomas, ranging from the professional license to the doctorate

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• Biodiversity and functioning of aquatic ecosystems

• Fishing: Diagnosis and management support

• Fish farming: stakes and changes

• Resource quality and biomonitoring

• Economic stakes, development, public policies and governance tools

Topics covered by research teams

Training at Agropolis International

Acronyms and abbreviations

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Genomics accessible to partners in the South

Genome diversity analyses and results, and applications for breeding varieties that are more productive and resistant to the main biotic and abiotic stresses present in tropical environments, should be readily accessible to research teams in developing countries.

Research and training resources are being focused on a limited number of platforms in the North and South to benefit maximally from the rapid progress in complex integrative biotechnologies.The Agropolis advanced research platform contribution, backed by two proposal requests (1999 and 2001), has very substantial specific advantages.

Agropolis International is especially grateful to the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs and the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, CIRAD, CNRS, INRA and IRD for their support to this platform.

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Agropolis advanced research platform

• A technology platform tuned to the needs of developing countrie
• Agropolis platform setup and operations
• Results: impacts and benefits
• 2000-2004: experimental milestones
• What are the prospects?

• Molecular markers to enhance tropical biological resource characterization and management...
• Key genetic factors and location of physiological components determining the productivity of natural rubber crops assessed using the QTL approach in Thailand
• Candidate genes to enhance phosphorus use for symbiotic nitrogen fixation in common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.)
• Pathosystems linking the Arabidopsis plant model and the bacterium Ralstonia solanacearum
• Mapping translocations in the banana genome using molecular cytogenetic techniques
• Study on integrating the banana streak virus in the banana (Musa) genome
• Characterization of drought tolerance genes in durum wheat
• Genetic transformation of pigeon pea and sorghum...
• Biopesticides produced via heterologous expression of Bacillus thuringiensis and Photorhabdus luminescens and isolation of new strains
• Genetic improvement of coffee varieties for resistance to leaf rust (Hemileia vastatrix)
• Development and effective use of ESTs for studying starch biosynthesis and resistance to cassava bacterial blight
• Pathogenicity of the rice yellow mottle virus and durability of resistance
• Study on rice blast resistance genes

Glossary

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Coordonnator : René Sforza (EBCL)

Within the Agropolis International community, about fifty scientists are directly involved in research on biological control as well as several hundred more indirectly. This constitutes the premier French scientific campus of its kind and one of the most important in Europe, dealing with various and complementary competencies such as those covered in the following chapters.

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Characterising biodiversity in agroecosystems

• Taxonomic tools serving biological control
• Assessment of invasive species
• Legislation and regulatory aspects...

• Evaluating host specificity and interactions
• Characterization of genetic diversity

• Classical biological control
• Sustainable plant protection for sustainable agriculture
• Agroecology: another vision of sustainable agriculture

Dissemination of scientific and technical culture

Topics covered by research team

Education and training at Agropolis International

Glossary

List of abbreviations

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Coordonnator : Michel Soulié (Agropolis International)

Water sciences are essential in our societies.

Higher education institutions and research centres are organised to pool their expertise, analytical means and site equipment into training and research. When the scientific questions allow for it, they share research sites and observatories in the region, in Europe and in Mediterranean and tropical countries.

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• The impact of climatic variability

• Organisation and evolution of cultivated slopes

• Discontinuous hydrological environments

• The contamination of aquatic environments

• Developed hydrosystems, territories and societies

• Natural and anthropic risks

• Water purification and waste water treatment

Topics covered by research teams

Education and training at Agropolis

List of acronyms and abbreviations

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