CHOICES1

The UE will correspond to a situation to which the students will have to respond. The teaching team of the UE will represent the directions of engineering offices which are in charge of carrying out impact studies following a development project.

The students will play the role of experts from the study offices and will have to carry out analyses on the project area. They will have to provide a report of their impact study in which they will have identified the ecological stakes which they will have classified according to their importance. They will also have to present their studies orally.

The UE will be articulated around 6 sessions of TD of 2h at the beginning of the semester during which the following points will be approached:

TD1: Presentation of the EU, presentation of what an impact study is and what is expected from such a study (this part will be carried out by a professional whose job is to verify impact studies), presentation of the status of the studied areas: ZNIEFF, Natura 2000.

TD2 to 6: Presentation of analysis methods for different groups of organisms (plants, arthropods, herpetofauna, avifauna and chiroptera, soil fauna...).

For the remainder of the EU, students will be required to propose study protocols to estimate the potential impacts of the proposed project. The protocols set up will have to allow for the closest possible assessment of the impacts and the studies will have to budget their interventions. They will then have field sessions to set up their protocol, collect data and then analyze them. The pedagogical team will tutor the groups in order to guide them in their work. They will write a thesis based on a set of specifications provided by the educational team. This deliverable must be supported by field data and data from the bibliography. They will defend their file in front of the pedagogical team during an oral presentation.

Several study areas to carry out the work have been targeted in Montpellier: Triolet Campus, Mosson River, Parc de la Vallet, Montpellier Center, Parc Méric, Rives du Lez, Garrigues de la Lauze...

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This UE is a first approach of Conservation Sciences according to the points of view of the various actors:

- scientific approach: basic and practical approach to conservation and restoration of populations and communities

- societal approach: role of the scientist in the management of species and ecological environments, and interactions with other conservation actors (managers, local actors)

- ethical approach: reflection on the values of biodiversity (quantifiable, preferential, normative) and their applications according to different models, placed in a historical context (mainly ecosystem services and sustainable development)

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This introductory course will capitalize on the mathematical tools encountered throughout the bachelor's degree and particularly in the course of the Modeling of living organisms: theory (option of S4), in order to provide an overview of the different approaches and techniques for modeling living organisms. All the major families of mathematical models will be addressed: static (optimization problems, game theory) as well as dynamic (extensions of the systems seen in S4, introduction to stochastic processes). Examples of applications of these models will be diversified, covering many biological systems as well as different levels of organization (metabolic, epidemiological, meta-community models...). Particular attention will be paid to epistemological aspects (contributions of modeling to the construction of theories in life sciences) and practical aspects (identifiability, calibration, and parametric sensitivity on the one hand, numerical implementation/simulations on the other). Finally, it will be an opportunity for students to become familiar with the research themes involving modeling, developed in the Montpellier basin.

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This UE is structured according to a professional inventory approach during which students will be put in real situation to emphasize their naturalist skills. This one will consist of a field study, with mainly volume of field supervision through SPS for the project follow-up. In this, it is in line with the logic of the ex-CMI (Opus 4).

Eight groups of 5 students will work on the inventory of a specific taxon within the framework of a clearly identified scientific problem. The study area will be different from one year to the next, and will be chosen by the teaching team according to opportunities for collaboration with organizations interested in the proposed approach. The organizations approached are :

- the Conservatoire des Espaces Naturels de Languedoc Roussillon

- the Zoo du Lunaret, manager of the Lez reserve

- the metropolis of Montpellier

The feedback will consist of a common deliverable for the whole class, including a hierarchy of conservation issues. The management organizations of the studied areas will be invited to the presentations.

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The aim of this course is to acquire, reinforce and synthesize notions and knowledge in evolutionary paleontology, sedimentology and paleoecology, and apply them to the fossil world. Together, these notions provide the keys to infer the stratigraphic context and the past environments in which extinct organisms lived.

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