Lessons from Africa and beyond
Invasive species and associated socio-environmental issues
THE WAS@BI
Scientific Committee
Lecturer-Researcher
Amadou Bocar BAL is Professor at Gaston Berger University (UGB) of Saint-Louis in Senegal since October 2010, after having served at the National Agricultural Research Center (CNRA) of Bambey in Senegal from 1985 to 1990 as a researcher in agricultural entomology, then at the AGRHYMET Regional Center in Niamey (Niger) from 1990 to 2010 as an expert-trainer. Entomologist within the Training and Research Unit of Agronomic Sciences, Aquaculture and Food Technologies (UFR S2ATA), he is concerned with the management of animal pests, including invasive species of insect crop pests. A.B. Bal is also coordinator of the activities of the University Pedagogical Center (CPU) of UGB.
Email : amadou-bocar.bal@ugb.edu.sn
Lecturer-Researcher
César BASSENE is specialist in plant systematics and weed science in Gaston Berger University, Saint-Louis, Senegal. His previous studies enabled him to acquire skills in species identification and inventory and ecology of weed flora. The practical applications of these skills has led him to conduct studies in these fields in the southern Groundnut Basin area, in Lower Casamance and in the Senegal river delta and valley. He also took part in many activities such as the TABEC-RN Master students' field school, and in various inventories of flora and vegetation (e.g. in the classified forest of Patako and Madeleine Islands National Park, or for the reference study on the situation of aquatic plants in the hydraulic axes of the Dagana delegation of SAED). He participates in student supervision in the sections of plant production and agronomy of various University programmes (DUTAGE, L3PVA and Master PTPA-PVA).
Email : cesar.bassene@ugb.edu.sn
Researcher
Thierry Brévault is a specialist in insect ecology applied to integrated pest management. He is a researcher at CIRAD (French Agricultural Research Centre for Sustainable Development) within the research unit "Agroecology and sustainable intensification of annual crops". He is currently based at the BIOPASS laboratory (Population biology and ecology of animal communities of Sahelo-Sudanese ecosystems, Centre de recherche de Bel-Air, Dakar, Senegal). He has extensive expertise on the relationships between agricultural practices, land use, biodiversity and ecological processes involved in natural pest control in agroecosystems. Such knowledge is a prerequisite to assist the design of ecologically-intensive farming systems, especially to sustainably manage invasive pests in Africa such as the fall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda, the tomato leaf miner, Tuta absoluta, or the Oriental fruit fly, Bactrocera dorsalis. He is a member of the scientific committee of the French High Council of Biotechnology (HCB) and coordinator of the West African platform for research and education for the design of agroecological farming systems (DIVECOSYS).
Email : thierry.brevault@cirad.fr
Researcher
Carine Brouat (UMR CBGP, CR1 IRD) is an evolutionary ecologist working on invasive and native rodents in Africa and their interactions with parasites. Developing a diversity of approaches from parasite community ecology to host population genetics, behaviour, and immunoecology/immunogenomics, she is leading research to understand the causes of invasion success of exotic rodents (e.g., the house mouse Mus musculus domesticus, and the black rat Rattus rattus, in Senegal). She is also working on the consequences of rodent invasions on the spread and persistence of some zoonotic pathogens (e.g., plague in Madagascar), and on public health.
Email : carine.brouat@ird.fr
Director of Research
Franck Courchamp is Director of Research at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He works at University Paris Saclay, where he leads a group of research, “Biodiversity Dynamics & MacroEcology”. Franck Courchamp did his Ph D thesis in Lyons, France, on the epidemiology of Feline AIDS. He then did a first postdoc at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography of UCSD, where he worked on the effects of invasive species on trophic relationships and a second postdoc in Cambridge, UK, on the inverse density dependence. In addition to these two ongoing topics, he now also works on the overexploitation of rare species, on the effects of climate change on biodiversity, and on charismatic species in conservation. Franck Courchamp has published over 135 scientific studies, and three books, among which two directed to the general public and he has presented his work in over 50 international conferences. He is also active in popularization, notably with several documentaries or motion design projects. He has been awarded the Silver Medal of the CNRS and elected as a Member at the European Academy of Science and holds the AXA Chair of Invasion Biology.
Email : franck.courchamp@u-psud.fr
Researcher
Ambroise DALECKY (UMR LPED, CR IRD) is a community ecologist working at Population Environment Development Laboratory since 2013. From 2006 to 2013, he has been a member of the CBGP laboratory. His research activities are grouped around two main themes: the ecology of rodent communities in anthropized ecosystems, and rodent invasions in West Africa. His research combines a strong field approach with a multidisciplinary perspective at the interface between biodiversity, health and societies. He has been involved in the monitoring of small mammal communities and their parasites in northern Senegal since 2007, as part of the West African Observatory of small Mammals as Indicators of Changes of the Environment (ObsMiCE).
Email : ambroise.dalecky@ird.fr
Lecturer-Researcher
Papa Madiallacké DIEDHIOU is Professor of Plant Pathology and Crop Protection at the Gaston Berger University of Saint-Louis SENEGAL and Head of the Department of Agronomic Sciences, Aquaculture and Food Technologies (UFR S2ATA). He obtained his PhD in 2001 at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Bonn (Germany).
He has trained a wide part of the young generation of plant pathologists in Senegal, first at the School of Agronomy (ENSA, Senegal) between 2003 and 2010, and then from 2010 onwards at the University Gaston Berger (UGB) of Saint-Louis.
His expertise encompasses plant health diagnosis, plant disease control, mycotoxins and food safety, pest risk analysis as well as sanitary and phytosanitary systems. He has benefitted from fellowships from the German Agency for International Cooperation (DAAD), the Cohran Fellowship Program (USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, Thalwitz Scholarship), IFAR, and project grants from IFS (International Foundation for Science), the African Union, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the International Atomic Agency, USAID, several grants from the Senegalese Fund for Research in Agriculture and Food Science, etc. He has authored or co-authored about 30 articles in peer-reviewed journals and has given many oral communications in a wide spectrum of conferences.
Researcher
Gauthier DOBIGNY is researcher at the French Institute of Research for Sustainable Development (IRD) in the Center of Biology for Population Mamagement. He is currently based at the Ecole Polytechnique d'Abomey-Calavi, Cotonou, Benin, where he works on ecology of zoonotic diseases associated with urban rodents (e.g. leptospirosis, bartonellosis, toxoplasmosis, hantavirus-mediated fevers, antibiotic multiresistant bacteria). In particular, he is interested in public health risk related to invasive rodents (black and Norway rats, house mice) that may modify circulation, maintenance and transmission of human pathogens. He also leads the International Research Group "West African Network on Biological Invasions" (GDRI-Sud WAN@BI) which aims at scientific animation, capacity building as well as academic, politic, socio-economic stakeholders awareness increasing about biological invasion challenges in West Africa.
Email : gauthier.dobigny@ird.fr
Researcher
Nathalie GAUTHIER, entomologist, biologist and geneticist of populations, is a research fellow at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) and has been working at the Centre de Biologie pour la Gestion des Populations (Montferrier sur Lez, France) since 2001. Throughout her academic training [University & Institute of Research on Insect Biology (Tours, France), Department of Biology, Silwood Park (Ascot, U.K.), CNRS (Gif sur Yvette, France)] and since her recruitment to IRD, N. Gauthier is interested in insects of agronomic interest either because of the damage, direct and/or indirect, they cause to crops (ie. invasive or native crop pests) or because of their ability to control crop pest populations (ie. natural enemies such as parasitoids or predators). Her research aims to obtain fundamental and applied knowledge useful in pest population management through the characterization of the bio-ecology and genetic diversity of species communities, species and their populations at several spatio-temporal scales (e.g. focuses on: search for native natural enemies, population and damage dynamics, biotic and abiotic structuring factors, etc.). In the framework of bioinvasions, the preferred routes of introduction and dispersal of the invasive populations are also investigated.
Email: nathalie.gauthier@ird.fr
Researcher
Laurent GRANJON is a researcher at the French Institute of Research for Sustainable Development (IRD), posted in the Center of Biology for Population Management (CBGP) in Montpellier (France). His main research interests are in evolutionary systematics and ecology of African small mammals, mainly rodents (taxonomy, phylogeny, phylogeography, community ecology, population biology…). He has been involved in recent years in research projects dealing with invasive rodents in Senegal that included information dissemination and training of local stakeholders on invasive species and their impacts.
Email : laurent.granjon@ird.fr
Researcher
The researches of Karmadine HIMA focus on Population Genetics and Evolutionary Biology where he has ten years’ research experience. He is currently working on biological invasions as part of a sub-regional project that he manages, involving particularly Benin, Niger and Senegal. His researches relate to three major invasive species of rodents and insects that cause important damages to crops and food stocks and/or may also deeply impact public health through worldwide dissemination of pathogens in West African countries. His research goals are to describe and understand both the modalities and patterns of these major biological invasions, and their implications for public health and food security in West Africa.
Email : karmadine@gmail.com
Researcher
Christophe LEBOULANGER develops studies on phytoplankton ecophysiology, and more broadly dedicated to marine microbial ecology in a context of global and local anthropic pressures. He his strongly devoted to cyanobacteria, either as potentially toxic or of biotechnological interest, namely with fieldwork on West African lakes (Lake Guiers, Senegal, small reservoirs) to understand dissemination patterns and explain invasive success. A large part of his current work focuses on highlighting the effects of pollution (solid, chemical, or biological) on Mediterranean (Tunisia) and tropical (Gabon, Mayotte) coastal marine ecosystems.
Email : christophe.leboulanger@ird.fr